......Denial of language, in its essence, is an all out denial of the thought process, livelihood and culture of humanity. By removing text, he turns language into a collection of images and successfully renders them as drawing art. The implementation of language as drawing art is to detach the linguistic meaning from the image and to create new images and meaning while threading between text and context. Through implosion of language, previous images are born again into new images, and through the denial of these images, the screen is created. This rejects preconceived images of humanity and the static staleness of life and penetrates into hidden meanings. A new life can be entered by exposing this penetrative experience… What will we discover in the process of erasing man made languages one by one? At the cusp of language-less-ness, we are faced with mere naked existence. This face to face state with existence is what Eung-ki Kim is attempting to portray. These are the traces of text that underlie the hidden and the exposed and the colors we hide. In amidst of this duplicity he is trying to show us and deliver to us the realization of the reality of the dynamism of life and the experience of dynamic meaning. He acutely points out the discovery of the duplicity of language and the duplicity of visual images through this hide-and-seek, and provides a delicate convergence of the void spaces in between the structures of text.

(‘Through the Eyes Of Denial and Perception Of Text’, art critique Sun-hak Kang)

... In Eung-ki Kim’s work, the revised and erased letters of duplicate images bring chaos to the preexisting orderly and systematic relationship between symbols through the decomposition of meaning units and also through the overwritten changes in language codes… In his early works he erases most forms of text. By exhaustively and tenaciously scratching out or overwriting text depending on its layout and shape, he completely removes any specific symbols for communication. The slight refractions in the light that shine caused by the scratched out corrugated paper and the collisions in the immaterial colors evoke ‘a transcendent exsistence achieved through the process of purification and filtration’.

(‘Palimpseste’ by Eung-ki Kim. curator Chang-rae Jun)