MIRU KIM

Miru Kim’s latest attempt at extreme connection to her environment involves pigs, dirt, and some good composition. Somewhat unsettling at first sight, the images in her latest series, The Pig That Therefore I Am, reveal a calmness set with a monochrome palette and careful composition of subject and setting. In IA 1, the artist crouches off to the left of the frame, the energy of the whole image drawn to her figure as pigs swarm towards it in curiosity; as if to examine a newly-landed alien. MO 2 is very classically divided in two halves, with Kim standing as a calm, almost passive, leader between the two rows of industrially uniform pig-pens.  

Thematically, Kim’s motivation is very clear. She means to see if one can blur the line between man and pig. Pigs are very close to us, anatomically speaking, she argues. We even use them to harvest organs and tissue for scientific research because of how close they are to our own biology. Is there a deeper connection there? The first five prints of the show (Composition 1 – 5) present various sections of the artist’s body pressed against a hog’s. The only way to differentiate which skin belongs to what creature is to look at texture and hair, and the uneasy surprise, after staring for a while, is that it’s easy to forget what a hog looks like and what Miru Kim looks like. By the time you reach the last image, Composition 1, you can’t help but notice the dirt on the artist’s skin and marvel at the cleanliness of the hog.

In each image Kim blends in rather seamlessly. Her face always covered by her black hair lends her a non-identity similar to that of the pigs around her, crowded in large-scale industrial farms, mass produced and anonymous. Pairings of man and beast are always a little iffy, even in art, and Miru Kim must be commended here if for nothing else but her bravery. In her previous series, Naked City Spleen, she went to extremes to explore the connection between us and our world. (I wonder how many bouts of pneumonia Miru Kim has survived having spent all that time naked in cold, sometimes dank, urban settings.) Here she removes the protective barriers of clothing we take for granted to explore a connection between us and an animal we probably also take for granted, and gives us images that play a balancing act between vulnerability and power, between individuality and anonymity, between being human and being pig.