Bearing multiple heads, eyes and limbs, Tae Kim’s willowy, elfin figures appear glitching, caught in a seemingly endless process of transformation that allows them to exist in different forms and states all at once. < My Child’s Nth Finger >, the Korean artist’s solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery Berlin, expands on her ongoing investigations into hybridity, questioning how we define or quantify humanity in a digital age. As she imagines new and shifting forms of figuration, Kim relates the portrait painting process to giving birth and refers to the characters as her babies. The intimacy and labour of the act of creation is referenced by the show’s title which also conveys the idea of an evolving process or an unknowable future, which has the potential to be transformative as well as monstrous.

 

To create this latest series of paintings Kim not only looked to the aesthetics of online avatars and gaming but also to mythological stories and creatures, specifically the nine-tailed fox that appears in eastern Asian folklore and is known for its ability to shapeshift. In Dysfunctional Night, the fox appears as the figure’s spirit or accomplice, its multifarious body creating a swirl of colour and movement, emblematic of a volatile or changeable state. The figure at the centre meanwhile appears morphing between various human, animal and cyborgian forms. Like all of Kim’s characters, they are androgynous and translucent skinned, suggesting an existence beyond the confines of gender and race while the sketched outline of the spinal bone structure retains the idea of human physicality and imperfection or frailty.