Readymade Flea Market

2020 - Painting (Painting)

100 x 130 cm

Hun Kyu Kim

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Readymade Flea Market is part of a series of works developed by Hun Kyu Kim. While the artist’s previous work drew a parallel between capitalism’s inherent social violence and the evolution of weaponry, Hun Kyu Kim now focuses on political nihilism and how to overcome it. In this new work he uses the metaphor of 3D Graphic Space to represent our current reality. In a way similar to Similarly to world simulation theories and Nick Bostrom’s thought experiment, a computer creates the reality in which animal characters exist. Following Bostrum’s view, the world we inhabit is nothing but a simulation that future humans have created in an attempt to reproduce the history of humanity. With better computing power, we could accurately stimulate all the neuronal connections in the human brain, thereby tricking every inhabitant of this simulated world into believing that the simulation is real. Due to the relatively fast increase of the power of computers in our societies, it is statistically more likely that we are in one of the many simulations rather than in the original one. The term coined for such a simulation is “Ancestor simulation”. In the simulation pictured by Hun Kyu, the overheating of the Graphics Processing Unit that nourishes the simulation and gives it consistency represents the overheating of our post liberal economies and the contradictions that it creates. Its failing creates chaos and spatial inconsistencies. Animals in the middle of panic buying populate the canvas, in a way that echoes the very real situation that our societies have experienced in the past months. As the world around them collapses and the simulation increasingly fails, anthropomorphic animal characters fight to buy goods that might very well be worthless. Televisions filling the shelves of the supermarket show that these shelves are empty, the artist’s comment on the information age and the priority of production in the age of late-capitalism. In a world where individuals are reduced to mere consumers, the only behaviour left in the face of danger is to frenetically shop, as the reference to Barbara Kruger’s 1987 foundational work « I shop therefore I am » shows. We recognize in the painting elements that are all too familiar to us, such as the surgical masks and gloves or the weird focus on toilet paper.

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Inspired by the tradition of Korean silk painting, Hun Kyu Kim crafts poignant allegorical pictures employing an almost limitless range of historical inquiry. Vast intricate narrative universes, laced with intense imagination, reflect upon a post-globalized world grappling with the effects of technological neoliberalism. Deep hierarchical structures, extreme belief systems and political polemics are displayed through detailed narratives often driven by a frenzy of anthropomorphic proxies. Time and space conflate, portraying an eternal state of emergency, where violent outbursts aren’t merely accidents but normative traits of social interaction. Commercial commodities and pop cultural tropes (from Pokémons, to selfies, to art) place the landscape in an ostensibly fantastical world grounded in the realities of the contemporary condition. Kim’s work functions as an anomaly of sorts, which is simultaneously illustrative but emblematic, detailed but diagnostic, cute but critical.

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