IF YOU SEE ME
                   NOW YOU DON’T


SANG WOO KIM
January 13 - February 12, 2017
Opening reception: Friday, January 13, 6 - 9 PM

MB Gallery is pleased to announce Sang Woo Kim’s first solo exhibition, IF YOU SEE ME NOW YOU DON’T. This exhibition comprises a body of new paintings, photography and video work that reflect the artist’s layered conception of identity.

In this exhibit Kim looks at a much discussed and relevant topic, first generation immigrants and their struggle with cultural duality. He brings awareness to this conflict and expresses it poetically and also with a sense of irony and humor. His aim is to surprise the viewer and cause a disruption that allows people to truly “see”.

Sang Woo Kim was raised in London with traditional Korean parents. He always felt “other” to the people around him, whom were mainly of Western descent. Alienating cultural factors affected him from a very young age. At home a cognitive dissonance arose from a drastically different daily school life. With this new body of work he is confronting these memories through a recontextualization of old works. He literally builds up and breaks down boundaries to create a visual “skin” composed of nostalgia and recollections.

The emotional realisation of his fractured identity imbues the works with a newfound purpose that he subversively exploits through his various facades. Identity takes on new connotations in the modern social media world, where one’s persona is a multi-layered construct and can be created out of thin air. The question inherent in Kim’s work is what constitutes identity and how much of it is “real”?

Kim’s paintings are abstract and textured, capturing a similar emotional brutality that was present in artworks from the 1950’s abstract expressionist era. The blurred lines and varying textures remove the identity of the subject. He purposefully uses abstraction as a means to communicate detached melancholy content. Text drawn on his painting, “Easy on the eye” reads, I was blind when I was younger, and conflates seeing and being seen, the subject and the voyeur. Kim’s paintings suggest that the gaze comes from within and is tied to one’s identity and until one can cultivate it, one will always view himself and the world self consciously.