KwanYoung Kim
30 November - 29 December, 2024
L GALLERY, in collaboration with BBillion Art and Lightwell, presents Just go with the flow, KwanYoung Kim’s third solo exhibition in Taiwan.
Across KwanYoung Kim’s paintings, fragments of color appear, recede, and return. Points, lines, planes, and irregular forms remain suspended across the canvas without settling into a single image or narrative. Some gather into dense clusters, while others drift apart, leaving intervals of untouched space. Rather than reconstructing a particular memory, Kim treats these elements as its residues—traces that persist after their origins have become difficult to locate.
This approach continues his ongoing series, The Memories of the Unconscious, in which memory is understood not as something preserved intact, but as something continually altered by time, emotion, and recollection.
In Just go with the flow, the compositions become noticeably more spacious. Forms are distributed with greater restraint, and empty areas carry as much weight as the painted elements themselves. The viewer’s gaze moves between density and openness, presence and absence, without being directed toward a fixed center.
Color also shifts toward darker and more subdued tones. Warm and cool hues coexist through subtle variations in brightness and saturation, producing a quiet tension rather than a dramatic contrast. Happiness and sorrow, movement and stillness, certainty and hesitation remain unresolved on the same surface.
For Kim, color has long functioned as a direct register of emotion. Here, however, feeling is dispersed across layers, intervals, and changes in intensity rather than concentrated in a single expressive gesture. A muted field may be interrupted by a vivid tone; a floating form may be countered by another that anchors the surrounding space.
The title Just go with the flow reflects both the movement within the paintings and a shift in the artist’s attitude toward his practice. Rather than forcing fragments into coherence, Kim allows them to remain provisional. The works move between accumulation and dispersal, between what can still be recalled and what has already slipped beyond recognition.
As KwanYoung Kim’s third solo exhibition in Taiwan, Just go with the flow marks a quieter phase within The Memories of the Unconscious. What once emerged through energetic color and dense construction now gives greater space to silence, interval, and ambiguity. Memory remains fragmented, and the image remains open.
Just go with the flow