LOS ANGELES — For many of us, a digital alarm is our sign to get up. We transfer via our day, work previous daytime below fluorescent lights, and commit hours to watching pixels transfer round a display at evening. Cindy Ji Hye Kim’s exhibition Animal Triste at François Ghebaly gallery transports us to an earlier time, taking inspiration from agrarian labor cycles illustrated in medieval calendars to rethink the psychic connection between the physique and the land.
Within the entrance room, small-scale noir portraits depict pairs in varied states of embrace. In “Animal Triste” (all works 2025), the exhibition’s namesake, we see a feminine determine together with her arms wrapped round her lover, her ribcage illuminated from inside. These quiet scenes, the press launch tells us, are supposed to mirror the final remnants of winter earlier than the spring equinox, a time of yr related to planting seeds, staying indoors, and ready for the crops to develop. This concept comes into fruition as one continues across the room, the place we encounter intimate scenes depicting a mom and a baby, rising collectively like a tree and a seed. In “Awakening,” a stark white and blue window divides the house, contrasting the darkish coolness of home hibernation and the welcoming mild of spring outdoors.
Cindy Ji Hye Kim, “Primavera” (2025), acrylic, ink, graphite on silk with formed birch stretcher bars
The second room is bifurcated with patterned birch planes that evoke the construction and use of Korean folding screens. Fittingly titled “Primavera,” these frames are machine-etched with cherry blossoms that welcome spring-time crop cycles of rebirth and harvesting. Different works on this room, equivalent to “Fixed Sun,” “Human Design,” and “Harvester,” depict masculine laborers reaping with scythes, poised in fastened positions that convey aggressive, animalistic — generally violent vitality. These are counterbalanced by works that includes symbolic female types, equivalent to a snake in “The Other-half of Eve,” the moon in “Buried Fire,” and a falcon in “The Falcon and the Falconer III.” Collectively, these archetypes of masculinity and femininity appear to recast narratives which have survived to as we speak by way of oral histories, shifting the up to date focus from the person again to the collective.
As Kim demonstrates in her decisive portrayals of laboring our bodies at their most important factors, our collective unconsciousness has all the time been tied to pure cycles of life, irrespective of how a lot modernity obfuscates the actual fact.
Cindy Ji Hye Kim, “Buried Fire” (2025), acrylic, oil, graphite, charcoal, pastel on canvas
Cindy Ji Hye Kim, “Midnight Flower” (2025), acrylic, oil, charcoal, pastel on canvas
Cindy Ji Hye Kim: Animal Triste continues at François Ghebaly (2245 East Washington Boulevard, Downtown, Los Angeles) via April 19. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
