Gedok Gallery
Inock Kim-Seifert exhibits in Heidelberg
Inock Kim-Seifert in front of her large format (excerpt) "Details of the World and Cultural History", which was created around 2012. Photo: Matthias Roth
From Matthias Roth
Heidelberg. In 5th grade she learned to play the piano, in 6th grade she learned to draw with Indian ink. She was therefore considered privileged in South Korea in the 1970s: After the Korean War, the country was bitterly poor, "poorer than the north," said Inock Kim-Seifert, who shared her hometown of Chun Cheon near Seoul attacked political leaflets . She later went to Sydney to study graphics and spent formative years in China and Malaysia. Fate brought her together on a mountain hike with a German, with whom she went to Germany two years later: Today the artist lives in Hirschberg an der Bergstrasse.
She briefly signs her pictures with "Inock", as can now be seen in the Heidelberg Gedok Gallery at the Römerkreis . The name refers to the jade stone. Photography and painting are Inock Kim-Seifert's main fields of activity, one of which is partly dependent on the other.
"I tend to do free abstraction for relaxation, in the break between other work," she says openly. But she takes a long time to work on this "other work". Her main work, a diptych with a total of three by two meters entitled "Details of the World and Cultural History" was created around 2012. It seems to be a snapshot, a collage of current events - and yet it has not become out of date in the meantime. Rather - and unfortunately! - on the contrary.
The religious conflicts have increased, the violence has become almost everyday occurrence: In the center of the picture you can see dancing dervishes and Buddhist monks as well as a shaman, behind it a "demonstration" of Yemeni women who stand up for the law, their daughters under 17 years of age to marry, that means: to be allowed to sell. On the left, Lady Gaga and a beggar sit in front of the "Bild" campaign "We are Pope", while a child is "baptized" in ice water. On this large format you can also find 9/11, a flying cow and the sinking Titanic (two film quotes) or a woman who is mistreated by police officers: the madness of this world becomes the iconography of our present. It is not surprising that Hieronymus Bosch Inock had the greatest influence on Kim-Seifert.
Born in 1961, Kim-Seifert is an eminently political artist, which is also shown by other works in this exhibition. For example the "Presents of the Emperor", a collage that refers to the enslavement of women for the Japanese emperor during World War II ("comfort women"). Kim-Seifert finds her motifs in newspapers and other media. With acrylic paints she captures them like a diary on the canvas, where they remind us: This is us, this is our world and our present. If we want to change it, we have to start now.
Info: Gedok-Galerie Heidelberg, Römerstraße 22, until April 6th.
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