Sea of Humanity

"Born in 1967 in South Korea, Peter Kim graduated in the late 1990s from the Marseille School of Art and Design, and has continued since career in the United States. In his native Korea, Confucianism and war brought economic growth and social restructuring quite late, only at the end of the 20th century. Korea thus developed a community spirit more important than individualism, morals and Korean social practices are very different from those of the West. The artistic training that Peter Kim received in France changed his vision of objects and society. While Korean education of its childhood remained academic, he was able, in Marseille, to develop his imagination freely and try new means of expression. His collection of objects begins in particular at this time, objects having in common to be containers, receptacles, to accommodate the liquid. Peter Kim, driven by a desire for openness and discovery of other practices, leaves his hometown of Gwangju in South Korea to go first to Marseille before living in London, Berlin and now New York. Marseille is the scene of a first revelation: a hellish vision of people fleeing for a world perhaps less constrained but just as violent. The other epiphany, more serene, is the predominance of the sea, of the people who cross it, travel there. From then on, Detaching from his academic teaching in Korea, Peter Kim's painting becomes more abstract, but above all serial. Peter Kim not only paints people but above all the passage of time, the passage between two spaces, the passage as an allegory. His paintings are crossed by several temporalities. Moments become entangled there, making certainty impossible. of a unit of time. Calm and threatening waters, on which men sail, motionless, filling the entire space of the gallery. […] The beings are extracted from their environment, their context and their landmarks, propelled in the heart of an enigmatic, dark and oppressive pictorial space. In this stagnant posture, they reveal themselves in the heart of a dormant and black water. In Peter Kim's work, water, an essential resource for the survival of humanity, is a symbol of equality. It represents memory. The colors, aqueous by nature, which the artist uses succeed in creating an atmosphere nocturnal and evanescent where anything can happen. Recalling that human beings are largely made up of water, this vision favors an all-encompassing approach both scientific and spiritual which could be at the origin of a world best, the fruit of a harmony between nature and human existence. Frederic Legros