SPACE February 2025 (No. 687)
Installation view of ‘Lost in the Garden’ on the basement floor / Image courtesy of ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL
Kim Byoungho, a sculptor well-known for his use of metallic materials to offer penetrating visions of a cross-section of contemporary society, is featured in a solo exhibition, ‘Lost in the Garden’, at ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL until Feb. 8. In the exhibition, 15 different works, including his representative work and new work, are presented to visitors. The artist took ‘garden’, an artificially cultivated idea of nature, to explain his design principles, exploring a compositional aesthetic through three-dimensional metallic sculpture. For him, the artwork is the ‘product’ of a mass production system using sophisticated machines. The artist exploits these metallic modules containing a geometric aesthetic as the basic unit of this sculpture. This combination is an attempt by the contemporary artist to accommodate various aspects of modern society through new sculptural forms. The entire exhibition has three floors; basement, first and third floors. An oval sculpture, called ‘civilisation’s excrescences’, is displayed on the basement and first floors. By looking closely at his works such as Horizontal Garden (2018) on the basement floor or Two Collisions (2024) and 57 Vertical Gardens (2024) on the first floor, visitors are expected to appreciate the various shadows cast by the sculpture, ‘civilisation’s excrescences’. On the third floor, works such as A Section of the Garden (2024), 9 Observations (2024), highlight the artist’s focus on planar and linear elements. Curved surfaces with a distinctive black finish and smoothly polished silver corners stimulate notions of human nature, understanding the concealed inner structure through cutting a cross-section. The mechanical garden, which has a contrasting relationship with this white cube exhibition space, sheds light on our reality through reflecting/projecting and repeating/expanding.
