KIM
CHAM
SAE
A Look Inside Kim cham sae
A Look Inside Kim Cham Sae
Park Soon-young (Culture and Arts Planner, Aesthetics)
Kim Cham Sae’s work conveys a bright, cheerful, colorful, and at the same time calm atmosphere. The pictorial forms and colors, reminiscent of a young child’s drawings, offer visual pleasure and evoke a sense of pure sensibility. However, when one encounters the exhibition title, Anxiety and Conflict, it is difficult not to sense a certain dissonance with these luminous images. Of course, an artist’s intention and a viewer’s interpretation need not coincide. Yet in order to truly take the artist’s hand, we must look closely at the images she has chosen to express.
Anxiety and Conflict is, in essence, a story of the artist herself and can be understood as a gesture of reaching out to others through the revelation of her inner world. The works in this exhibition may be broadly divided into three groups: those that depict inner emotions, the figures of others who look away, and an installation that invites the viewer into the artist’s room, a space filled with the motifs of her work.
In the paintings that visualize her inner state—composed in refined and elegant forms—the artist confronts emotions that writhe and collide within her. At the same time, she presses down the anxiety provoked by the presence of the other and attempts to gaze at it clearly on her own. She then calms these opposing movements and embodies them as images. Through a process of searching for colors, lines, and shapes that correspond to these inner visions, she transfers them onto the canvas, rendering what she has distinguished within herself.
The resulting images appear bright and cheerful, yet this brightness arises from our habitual way of reading images through familiar ideas. A red form that resembles a flower, for instance, is not in fact a flower, but a visualization of a sharp and difficult state of mind the artist has encountered. What may seem like a discrepancy between form and content is thus not a contradiction but a reflection of perception: the more intense and acute the artist’s emotional state, the sharper the form and the stronger the color become. Our own perception then translates this sharpness into vivid color and apparent cheerfulness. In other words, the gap lies not in the work itself, but in the distance between what we see and what we expect to see.
This tendency is deeply rooted in everyday life. When we face an object, a person, or a situation, we habitually interpret it through impressions formed by past experience. We categorize and systematize even ambiguous and diverse realities, drawing lines such as those between the “normal” and the “abnormal.” Such premature labeling is closely related to another group of works in the exhibition.
Here, the artist portrays figures who all look elsewhere. Six people, differing in clothing, facial color, hairstyle, and even in the number of heads they possess, sit as though posing for a photograph, yet none of them meets the viewer’s gaze. They do not look away out of shyness or avoidance; rather, their diverted eyes suggest a distortion produced by the social gaze itself. Although the artist collects these characters from casual sketches or dreams, she does not distinguish between normality and abnormality as society does. In this sense, their difference lies not in their bodies, but in the way they are seen.
The exhibition also includes an installation based on the artist’s own room—indeed, not merely to be seen, but to be experienced. The bedroom is both the origin of her work and the site of her emotional encounters. Beneath a warm blanket in the darkness, she confronts confused and contradictory feelings, and invites us to share this state. While the paintings translate confusion into visual form, the reconstructed room conveys warmth through scent, darkness filled with nocturnal energy, and carefully composed sound. As we illuminate the space with a flashlight and encounter the images one by one, we experience anxiety, conflict, and at the same time a sense of relief. These layered sensations become, in themselves, an aesthetic experience.
Kim Cham Sae describes her motivation for depicting inner states of anxiety and conflict as one of curiosity. Out of a non-scientific yet deeply attentive inquiry into how invisible emotions shape an individual’s life, behavior, and growth, she has drawn and recorded them. The “inside” may be emotion, memory, or an unknown unconscious realm—something one may wish to recall, erase, resent, or cherish. Though ultimately personal and inexpressible, it often becomes a source of both pain and transformation. The artist must have spent long hours confronting, easing, and refocusing her attention in order to reveal this reluctant inner self.
What remains for us, then, is to suspend our preconceptions, to empathize with the images as they are, and to look inward in response to her invitation. By doing so, we may meet her work—and ourselves—in a moment of quiet yet profound encounter.