REALTIART

 It was December of last year that artist Chanju Kim gladly accepted to be part of my project and donated one of his artwork. Last year passed by and now we are in October close to the end of the year. The art donation project that started with good intentioned projects like ‘Good Landlords’, ‘Sharing Masks with Love’ and etc. has so far  introduced thirteen artists and their art donations from April to October last year. However, it has been dragging on and going nowhere this year like the ongoing Coronavirus situation.

​

While a lot of people were struggling with many changes caused by Covid-19, going through a depressing time, I became pregnant. Although I had been waiting for it to happen, I was so anxious because of my age which happened to be far later than the so-called “best age” to be pregnant and the Covid-19 situation. There were many times that I sat down in front of my computer and tried to write about artist Chanju and ended up just looking at the monitor aimlessly. However, looking at his painting for a long time helped me understand the expression, ‘Art transcends space and time’, which I thought was superficial before. I also realised that art can be interpreted differently by the time and situation which can be part of what makes up the art.

​

 The subject of artist Chanju’s art is ‘Coexistence’. There are often children, cats, elephants, penguins, zebras and so on and they usually show their backs to us in a surrealistic space as one might see in ‘The Wizard of Oz’. It is a composition that makes you curious about the space they are looking at rather than their looks, and it makes you even more curious about what kind of space the artist wants to present. How different is that place from my reality? It was not long before I found out that I got pregnant that I received his donated artwork. Now, another life is a part of the world and the baby who is naive to this world which is far beyond the world in his paintings tells her existence every day by crying out loud.  In spite of my mom’s big concerns about our cat, Pharaoh, that animals get jealous too, he hands over the spot in my arms that was once his exclusive for over 9 years to the baby and sits right next to me. Maybe the world seen by the baby whose world is in black and white and the cat which cannot recognize the color red  is similar to the world in the artist’s paintings because of their purity.

​

A work of art is often called a microcosm created by an artist. Artist Chanju also shows the ideal world he pursues through his paintings. It is a world that is not presented by words so it can be anything. Is that why? The longer you look into it, the more different the ideal world in the paintings seems to be, the coexistence between me and my eighty-year-old dad where I am looking at his back and he is looking into the back of a child in Chanju’s painting, the coexistence between me with the thought that there are many more days he has lived for than the days he will be living on and I wish I could hold on to those days longer and longer and the baby that relieves the sadness because she has my dad’s DNA. I think the coexistence artist Chanju is talking about might be those kinds of affection.

​

Those banners shouting out ‘For the end of COVID-19!’ on the streets have disappeared, and we are now preparing to coexist with COVID-19 under the slogan ‘With COVID-19’. No virus would ever exist in the world of coexistence in artist Chanju’s work. However, even in reality like a dark, gloomy colored painting, I sometimes experience the blue world through a song that says people want to do but only can imagine and I feel the same with his artwork. It is the back of the eighty-year-old dad who has become my life-time rock, in the blue eyes of the baby that makes me swear to become her life-time rock, and the warmth of the cat that gives up my arms for the baby but has to attach his butt to my skin. What kind of coexistence does your utopia have?

​

Shinhae Kim