Eunju Kim whose persistent and coherent material has been the pencil lays bare on canvas the energies and lives that always transcend far beyond the images shown in her picture planes themselves. Despite that the contrast between black and white can generate certain monotonousness, the multi-coloredness of her work is secured as light is dispersed and is reflected by the black color of the lead of a pencil. That is, her images compactly bare her honest labor of the repetitive movement of the pencil in order to produce the texture engendered by the friction between paper surface and black lead. Her works’ iconographic depth and compositional solidity achieved with a pencil whose capability to create certain thickness of pictorial surface is very low of a pencil, which is considered to be one of light materials for drawings. Starting in the early 1990s, Eunju Kim has made works where repression and desire are entailed through drawings of human bodies and faces in violent brush strokes, which wriggle within the prison of the frame. Among her early works that well exemplify the distinctive traits of her artistic attitude and material is a large-scale work depicting a group of human bodies, make in the early 2000s, whose length is 20 meters and whose height 3 meters.fig1 In her series work of a group of human bodies, the simplified human figure are elbowing one another to secure their own space within the confinement of the quadrilateral frames of the picture planes and, nevertheless are unable to move themselves. This large-scale space of black immobile writhes was sufficient enough to have a strong impact on the minds of the viewers. In the mid 2000s her subject moved from human figures, into waves.fig2 Subject matter of the wave came natural to Eunju Kim who has acrid memories of her father and grew up near the sea. The works of waves are also made in large sizes of 4 5 to 20 meters in length. This series demonstrates the vitality of her brushwork better than her large-scale works of human figures. The viewers are invaded by the swallowing force of the poetic imaginations transmitted from her simple, lack surges and of the black lead fragments whose depth is utterly in the dark. Eunju Kim’s series work of the forms of vegetation shown at this biennale started in the mid 2000s. As suggested by her statement that the change in subject matter from human figures through waves to vegetation tells nothing but that of images, the transformation of subject matter is not that much significant considering the change in the continuum of the process of drawing lines one after another and of her persistent action. In other words, what she presents cannot be defined by forms and points to those movements that wiggle and infinitely multiply. No, it should be said that the temperance and control of energy, the clear division between blank space and images, and their relationship with empty space attest to the fact that the life of Eunju Kim do not stop oscillating between this and that, in a word, it is fair to say that Eunju Kim is not satisfied with representing an object as an object and is on the way to seek after one by one the strands of life force that wiggle in the deeps of life. In front of her works, therefore, the viewers ought to draw up their reason for being, the process of their action, and hence the life of their own.

(2010, 9. 11- 11.20 Exhibition in Busan Museum of Art Written by KIM Seong-Youn)