KAIST graduate, Woo Kim, has held her first private art exhibition “The Deongeori” in KAIST Vision Hall. The exhibition showcases acrylic paintings of deongeori that represents the world the artist observes. On October 8, the “Artist Talk” with Kim was held in the Main Library (E9), where the artist met with students to explain her artworks and the preparation process in detail.

Deongeori means a “lump, mass, an agglomeration, or a group of particles” in English. Due to the difficulty of finding an exact English translation of deongeori, Kim decided to use the romanization of Korean instead. According to Kim, “Deongeories represent the world that [she] observes, the things that exist in nature, such as trees, clouds, and people, or anything.”

When entering the exhibition, visitors will encounter “An-nyeong-ha-se-yo (2019)” which consists of four acrylic paintings depicting the collision of deongeori and three colored mirrors. “An-nyeong-ha-se-yo” showcases the first interactions, or greetings, of the deongeories. Kim describes greetings as “collisions that break boundaries between people and allow us to enter the territory of others”. During the Artist Talk, Kim pointed out that the mirrors are part of this collection to allow visitors to see themselves and create a collision with their own selves.

The main purpose of this exhibition is to express “momentariness”. Kim aims to illustrate changing but continuous moments in the paintings by utilizing curves instead of straight lines. She explains that “nothing in nature is a straight line, and I believe curves are the most natural state of everything.” Since the deongeories are made out of curves without a fixed form, they can change their shapes freely. The two art pieces under a common subtitle “Heurem,” which means “flow” in Korean, illustrate how the deongeories “create a new flow every minute and exist in different colors and shapes,” according to Kim.

The last section of the exhibition, “Screen,” portrays deongeories inside a screen. Unlike other paintings, the deongeories trapped inside a screen are expressed as stains rather than tangible objects with clear shapes. This new art style, Kim explains, is part of her process of defining her world. She said, “This last section of the exhibition is me throwing a question mark on how to develop the concept of Deongeori and the screen.” Although it is the end of her exhibition, it marks a new starting point of her artwork.

Meanwhile, Woo Kim’s exhibition “The Deongeori” will be held until October 25 in the Special Exhibition Gallery in KAIST Vision Hall. After graduating from KAIST, Woo Kim studied Contemporary Art at the École régionale des beaux-arts de Rennes in France and received a master’s degree in painting at the Royal College of Fine Arts of Brussels. Working on various forms of art including performances, installations, videos, and paintings, the artist is actively holding exhibitions in Brussels and Seoul.