Curatorial Note 

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ACHAA projects is delighted to present Diaries, recent work by Kim Kyoungae (SK) and Claire de Jong (SA). Kim Kyoungae's striking organic forms are inspired by the inner workings of the body and the machinery of healing. Limited to the confines of the hospital where her mother was being treated for cancer, she took to her sketchbook as the only medium compact enough to work in such surroundings – with monumental results. Claire de Jong, on the other hand, develops sculptural forms that take cues from the likes of Barbara Hepworth to embody rare havens of peace and contentment encountered in a lifetime of wandering. Forced into a peripatetic existence at an early age by dissident parents, she became a connoisseur of cities and their psycho-geographies. These cities, their inhabitants and the impressions they left behind, are condensed in the sensual geometry of her sculptures.

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Despite drawing on divergent traditions and different backgrounds, these artists share common ground in their quest for formal beauty and conceptual grace. Though intimate and quasi-autobiographical, their work is stripped of sentimentality, far removed from the kind of ego documentation that often finds critical favour. Foregoing the cult of the deskilled, both work from a finely honed sense of métier without preciousness or conceptual posturing. The viewer is granted the freedom to enter into the spaces they create – or not. But the distance invites approach. 

 

- Irene Schaudies