<Solo Exhibitions>
2014
Space Cottonseed, Ready-known, Singapore
2012
Gallery Simon, Object, Seeing, Seoul, Korea
Volta NY, New York, USA
Preternatural, Patrick Mikhail Gallery, Ottawa, Canada
2011
Shin il Kim, Kim Chong Yung Museum, Seoul, Korea
2010
Into, Riccardo Crespi Gallery, Milan, Italy
2008
Decoded Love, Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, New York, USA
Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan
2007
Galeria do Lago / Museu da Republica, Imagem Nao-Imagem, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Invisible Masterpiece, Pei Ling Chan Gallery at Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia, USA
Riccardo Crespi Gallery, Milan, Italy
2006
Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany
ARKO
Art Center-Arts Council Korea, Seoul, Korea
2005
Saltworks Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Ilju ArtHouse, Seoul, Korea
2004
Insa Art Space-the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation, Seoul, Korea

<Selected Group Exhibitions>
2014
Korea Artist Prize 2014, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea
2013
Korean Art from the Museum Collection: Grand Narrative Part II, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea
Tornielli Museum, Dove non si tocca, Ameno, Italy
Power, Where Does the Beauty Lie, SOMA, Seoul, Korea
White and White, Carlo Bilotti Museum, Rome, Italy
2011
Mediascape on Nam June Paik’s Walk, Nam June Paik Art Center, Gyeonggi, Korea
2009
Surveillance, Affirmation Arts, New York, USA
2008
The 3rd Seville International Biennale, Seville, Spain
The 5th Seoul International Media Art Biennale, Seoul, Korea
Hermes Foundation Misulsang Prize Exhibition, Seoul, Korea
2007
tina b. 2007, The Prague Contemporary Art Festival, Old Waterworks, City Fables, Prague, Czech Republic
2006
Special Exhibition-Young Korean Artists, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea
Singapore Biennale 2006, Singapore
Palau de la Virreina-La Capella, berlintendenzen, Barcelona, Spain
Analog Animation, The Drawing Center, New York, USA
Basis, Shin il Kim and Dirk Krecker, Frankfurt, Germany
TranSpace-there is no sculpture, Kim Chong Young Sculpture Museum, Seoul, Korea
Cultural Identity in Korean Computer-Mediated Art, Macy Gallery-Columbia University, New York, USA
2005
The Gift: Building a Collection for the Queens Museum, Queens Museum of Art, New York, USA
7th The Altoids Curiously Strong Collection, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, USA
Portland Biennial 2005, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, USA
Breaking the 4th Wall:Hors Cadrage, ISE Cultural Foundation Gallery, New York, USA
2004
Queens International 2004, Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY, USA
Gwangju Biennale 2004, Gwangju, Korea
AIM 24, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, New York, USA

<Awards>
2012
Kim Se Joong Young Sculpture Award, Korea
2009
President Award from Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, USA
2006
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space award, New York, USA
2004
Seventh Annual ALTOIDS Curiously Strong Collection, USA
Ilju House Emerging Artist Award, Korea

<Collections>
Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Korea
National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea Seoul Museum of Art, Korea
Kim Chong Yung Museum, Korea
Arts Council Korea Seoul Olympic Museum of Art
Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Korea
Museum of Art, Seoul National University
Seoul Square-Morgan Stanley, Korea
Arte Y Naturaleza, Spain Queens Museum of Art, USA
New Museum, USA
Halla Group, Korea Private Collections

Kim Shinil: Fingerprints of Vision

Choe Taeman (Art Critic)

Open the Eyes of the Mind
“One cannot see without mind.” This phrase appears in The Book of Words, a work by Kim Shinil that is erected on one wall of this exhibition. Of course, the phrase references the famous saying, “When the mind is not present, we look and do not see,” from the chapter “Rectifying the Mind” in the Confucian classic Daxue (The Great Learning). This quotation emphasizes the need to reform the mind in order to cultivate the body (or the person). But not all of the phrases from The Book of Words are taken from such sacred or classical texts; they also include many old adages and proverbs about the mind taken from common folklore: “A person with a right mind in life will become a right-minded ghost in death”; “When a person has a right mind and a kind heart, even their collar stands straight up”; “There is nothing to match the cunning of the mind.” This ‘book’ about the mind began from a thought that occurred to Kim while he was reading, when he began to wonder how it might be possible to transfer a book into the museum. For this work, words were taken from books and printed on plastic mats attached vertically to the wall. Because these mats are blank on one side, the audience has to slightly turn their heads in order to read the hidden words. Although the words are attached to the wall, the plastic mats are similar to paper, so that from certain angles, the viewer seems to be looking at a huge horizontal book. All of this amounts to Kim Shinil’s current fascination with the “mind.”
What is the mind? According to the dictionary, the mind is the ‘element, part, substance, or process that reasons, thinks, feels, wills, perceives, judges, and etc’. The mind is directly related to all of the conditions that make human existence possible, including biological security, self-esteem as an individual, and self-consciousness as a social being. At the same time, however, the mind is inseparable from our psychological impulses, including lust and desire. The mind also dictates our attraction, curiosity, or interest in certain objects or people. In addition, the physical responses through which we communicate with the world, such as the senses and emotions, may be thought of as resultant activities of the mind. Although most people consider the mind to be invisible and unquantifiable, we often describe it as if it had mass or spatial presence, e.g., ‘my mind is light’ or ‘my mind is very distant’. By saying ‘my mind is hurting’, we also associate the mind with the psychological and emotional responses taking place within our bodies. For evolutionary biologists, the mind can be seen as the culmination of millions of years of evolution, while neuroscientists view the mind as an endless series of chemical reactions taking place within the human neurological system. Perhaps the mind should not be considered as purely spiritual or mental entity, but rather as the product of physical processes happening inside our bodies. Indeed, more and more people are now using medications and hormone treatments to maintain not only physical health, but also emotional stability and well-being. Interestingly, this contemporary view recalls the ancient theory of the “four physical elements,” a Neo-Platonist idea that became popular during the Renaissance, which proposes that the health of the body is dictated by the “four humours” (i.e., black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, blood). In 1923, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl co-authored an important study on Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I (1514), which depicts an angel sitting with its chin resting in one hand and a mathematical compass in the other hand. The authors concluded that the image is a psychological self-portrait of the artist, who they say was born under the planet Saturn with tendencies towards melancholia and lunacy, due to an over-secretion of black bile (“melancholio”). A modernized version of this idea, known as the Mind-Body Identity Theory, claims that the mind is simply another part of the physical body, meaning that “mind” and “brain” are synonyms referring to the same object. Nonetheless, even if the mind can be expressed as a material with mass, it cannot be reduced to the language that we use to discuss the material world.
Perhaps Kim Shinil is not so much interested in the mind itself as he is in the representation of the mind through letters and language. When we hear or read the word “mind,” we instantly understand what it means, but if we are asked to explain or prove the existence of the mind, we have to carefully compose our thoughts and use vast numbers of words. This divides and discord between phenomenon and language is why Kim produces structures made from letters.
In the center of the exhibition, Kim has erected three columns composed of three Korean words, each with two syllables: “이념” (i.e., “ideology”); “믿음” (“belief”); and “마음” (“mind”). These “columns” are free-standing letters assembled from cut pieces of polycarbonate. But the space is actually occupied by the three Korean words, assembled from consonants and vowels. The letters are made from various three-dimensional structures, including triangles, quadrangles, and some pentagons, combined and connected together in complex ways. Thus, Kim’s letter structures may be thought of as three-dimensional representations of Jacques Lacan’s primary thesis, that the unconscious (i.e., the mind) is structured like a language. The positioning of the free-standing sculptures is also very important, in that they act as a screen for a video projected onto them from one of the walls. Of course, the letters are not shaped like a usual screen, so the light of the projection plays through and around them, causing the shadows of the letters to be cast onto another wall. Watching this video through the letter structures is like walking through a dense forest, an effect that is heightened by the presence of another structure, resembling a spider web, at one edge of the wall. The web-shaped structure and the letter columns coalesce to form an even more complicated structure, thereby visualizing the entangled state of the mind, reminiscent of a skein of yarn. Of the three words, “mind” is both the beginning point and the returning point, since both ideology and belief originate in the mind. With no mind, there can be no belief and no ideology. At the same time, however, these relationships are not purely linear. For example, our memories never obey the strict chronology of the temporal axis. They neither flow smoothly with the current from past to present, nor do they swim upstream from present to past. They go both directions, and also overlap, so that our impressions of different events can coexist at a single point. Or sometimes, like a broken bridge, they bear the traces of two connecting points, but remain disconnected.
The same can be said of Kim Shinil’s artwork. The three word columns serve as both an image and a screen on which other images are projected. Another image is projected on the wall behind, where indecipherable fragments of letters are formed. The projected images serve as a framework to form the letters, but the full effect cannot be perceived with only the naked eye. Indeed, if the projector were to be suddenly turned off, our eyes could no longer perceive the images, but they would still remain an indelible part of the structure. The letter structures are entangled like a spider web, distracting our eyes so that we fail to perceive that fact that the projected fragments are actually the interiors of the letters. Visitors must pass through a narrow corridor to enter the exhibition space, at which point they can see the interiors of the letters through the spider-web structure, but then they fail to perceive the three words that are erected within the space. When seen through gaps as fine as the strands of a spider web, the letter sculptures recall the cube structures of Minimalism. In the corner, past the three columns, there is another structure, consisting of a square perched atop a thin pole. Upon closer examination, the square is made from three smaller letter structures that are constantly shaking very slightly. This gentle tremor may be a visual analogy for the palpitations of an elated heart, or it might be meant to remind us that such palpitations are the surest proof that we are alive. But Kim goes a step further by placing the structure in front of a mirror, thus incorporating the rest of the indoor landscape. In order to understand the complex relationship among all these works—the video, the letter columns, the simple and yet highly conceptual structures—we must first explore Kim’s fascination with language, or more specifically, with letters. His works traverse the territory between seeing and believing, seeing and being seen, being and non-being, and looking and staring. In order to understand this installation, we must trace his intentions and methods from the work that he has produced thus far in his career.

Between Seeing and Being Seen
After studying sculpture in Korea, Kim Shinil continued his education in the U.S., where he attempted to move beyond the traditional conception of sculpture as objects with mass and volume, made from concrete materials. He became more interested in expressing his ideas through videos, rather than through three-dimensional objects, which led him to devise a new technique known as “embossed drawing.” Upon his return to Korea, Kim presented his first solo exhibition at Insa Art Space in March 2004. This event brought the young artist into the public eye for the first time, but more importantly, it allowed him to introduce his “pressed line drawings” in his Invisible Masterpiece series, which forced the audience to contemplate the line between absence and existence. For this series, Kim used still frames from a video recording to make photos of people looking at artworks in a museum, with one important alteration: the artworks themselves are removed from the photos, so that the people seem to be staring at a blank wall. In conjunction with these photos of people in museums with no artworks, Invisible Masterpiece included a three-channel video of Kim’s embossed drawings of the viewers, who are minimally represented with delicate lines pressed into the paper, as if to emphasize their anonymity. Initially, this might seem to be Kim’s way of representing the general anonymity of museum visitors, but he has never been particularly interested in portraying anonymity. Instead, he is more interested in the act of seeing itself. When Kim visits a museum, he tends to quietly observe the people, rather than the exhibits. In particular, he notes how people behave when standing before a supposed masterpiece of art. Indeed, Invisible Masterpiece evokes a fundamental question: “What is a masterpiece?” Only after erasing the artworks from the walls did he portray the viewers. After all, the embossed drawings are not meant to represent the artworks, but the odd behavior of people who are seeing, or at least earnestly looking for something in an empty space. By questioning the prevalent notion that “seeing is believing” and “only visible things are true,” Invisible Masterpiece forces us to reconsider why we visit museums.
To make his embossed drawings, Kim uses a sharp tool to press lines into white paper. The resulting images are extremely subtle yet elaborate, as the folds create a delicate play of shadows that causes the forms to morph depending on the amount or direction of the light. Invisible Masterpiece is closely related to The Thinker (2005), an animation of embossed drawings of Rodin’s famous sculpture that Kim made as part of the Media Raiders series organized by Ilju Art House. The screen showing the animation of The Thinker is set on a support that is the same size as the support of the original sculpture. Kim’s embossed drawings simply capture the external appearance of their subject, but when these drawings are projected on a screen, they arouse much deeper questions about the essence of sculpture or a masterpiece. Again, Kim is not as interested in Rodin’s sculpture as he is in the audience’s awestruck reaction to the work. This interest can be traced back to Invisible Masterpiece, which captures people’s desire to experience an artistic masterpiece. In a museum, some people get as close as possible to the works to examine their details, while others keep their distance, crossing their arms and whispering their thoughts to their companions. Of course, the artworks are conspicuously absent in Kim’s series, which thus recalls Howard Kanovitz’s The Opening (1967), a photo-collage of an audience in a museum devoid of artworks. By removing the artworks, Kanovitz emphasized museums as the site of high-class socializing, where pretentious people gather to socialize and flaunt their elegant taste. On the other hand, Kim eschews such social critique in order to question our perception and experience of artistic masterpieces, as well as to elicit our thoughts on the nature of looking and seeing, absence and existence. Further insight about Kim’s intentions can be gleaned from his own notes on his work, which are worth quoting at length:

“I’m primarily motivated by a desire to recognize and overcome the limitations of the theoretical development of art history through “emptiness,” a central concept of Eastern philosophy. Through my pressed line drawings, I’m trying to find balance, which is something essential to every person. The pressed lines are simultaneously visible and invisible, depending on the light. To make an animation, I have to shoot thirty pressed line drawings per second. Envisioning each frame of the video, I make each pressed line drawing to serve as a moving image frame to be reinterpreted when projected as a video. I try to make different forms by combining two, three, four, and five dimensional attributes, like painting, sculpture, video, and light. In this way, objects can be reinterpreted as something else, which elicits the ambiguity between existence and absence, and references Buddhist thoughts and Zhongyong (The Doctrine of the Mean). For me, this process is all about using art to visualize the point of intersection between form and emptiness.
Sometimes ordinary acts of everyday life can acquire a different meaning through a new perception or relationship. This is what my works try to capture. I am always gazing into the relationship between person and object, between person and person, and between myself and another person.”

In 2005, after receiving a grant from ARKO (Arts Council Korea), Kim went to Berlin as part of Künstlerhaus Bethanien, an artist residency program. Upon returning to Korea, he held a homecoming exhibition in 2006 at the ARKO Art Center, where he presented his video-installation work The Ascension of Christ, based on Raphael’s famous Renaissance painting. While in Berlin, Kim asked eight of his fellow artists-in-residence from various countries to pose as the figures in Raphael’s painting. He filmed their re-enactment and then used still images from the video to create embossed drawings. Next, he used the drawings to make animated videos, which he projected onto eight screens. Again, all of the colors and details were removed from the resulting works, such that only the outlines of the people remain. This process can also be interpreted within the context of wuwei (無爲), meaning inaction or “not doing,” an integral concept from Zhuangzi. It is also closely related to the Buddhist concept of sunyata (Sanskrit), which refers to absolute emptiness or the void. He once spoke about this topic during an interview with me:
For a long time, I’ve been interested in sunyata and madhyamā-pratipad (Sanskrit, meaning ‘middle way’). Taken literally, emptiness means an absolute vacuum, but I’m more interested in the idea that ‘form is emptiness, emptiness is form,’ from The Heart Sutra. My interest in sunyata is why I remove the colors and details from my works. Of course, the drawings still have some lines, but those are just folds in the paper, rather than drawn lines. I guess they can still be considered lines, but in a truer sense, they are just the traces of the process of embossing. If someone calls those traces ‘lines,’ then they can be lines, or vice versa…But they actually take a lot of time and effort, because the folds have to be exceptionally delicate. In that regard, they can also be seen in the context of wuwei.

This comment reflects Kim’s interest in Buddhism as a philosophy, rather than as a religion. My curiosity led me to question him further about his interest in Buddhism, and he said that it dated back to a philosophy course he took in college. The class focused exclusively on Western philosophy, which actually caused Kim to start reading books of Eastern philosophy, including Buddhism. As such, he learned about sunyata and the concept of the mean, until Buddhist philosophy and the philosophies of Laozi and Zhuangzi eventually served as the theoretical background of his embossed drawings. After majoring in sculpture in Korea, Kim originally studied media art in the U.S., but he eventually found that an immaterial, time-based form such as video could not express materiality in the same way as drawing. In today’s society, we are surrounded and besieged by gratuitous media and images, precluding any chance for contemplative thought, but Kim consciously avoids videos that offer an overload of images. As defined by Marshall McLuhan, ‘hot media’ is filled with vibrant colors, provocative texts, and superfluous information, and thus tends to confuse people and overwhelm the senses. However, Kim’s video animations of his embossed drawings are better thought of as ‘cool media’, which aims to encourage contemplation. The gap between Kim’s photos of people staring at empty walls and his videos of embossed drawings is based on his observation of people seeing, but more importantly, in how those works question whether what we see is indeed true.
These ideas are clearly reflected in another of Kim’s video works, In Between, wherein a single person stares appreciatively at the wall of a museum, but rather than a painting or sculpture, the person is looking at a video of another person who is also staring at a video of another person, ad infinitum. Naturally, this work is installed on a wall, so that people outside the frame would view people inside the frame viewing other people, clearly evoking the tension between seeing and being seen. The situation echoes Michel Foucault’s analysis of Las Meninas, the painting by Diego Velasquez, from his book Les Mots et les Choses (published in English as The Order of Things). In the painting, a lovely princess visits an artist’s studio and poses to have her portrait painted. When we first encounter the painting, our eyes are initially drawn to the center, where the young girl is busily attended by several servants and maidens. But eventually, our gaze encounters the face of the artist on the left side of the painting. The artist is positioned such that, as he steps back to examine his canvas within the painting, he is actually staring straight out at the viewer outside the frame. Thus, we are left with the distinct feeling that, rather than seeing the painting, we are instead being seen by Velazquez inside the painting. But the artist is not the only one looking at us; on the wall behind him, there is a mirror showing the reflection of the king and queen, who also seem to be looking out at us. Through this complex network of looks, Las Meninas masterfully disturbs the relationship between seeing and being seen.
Jean Paul Sartre also wrote about this disruption of glances, using the analogy of a person peeking into a room through a keyhole who is suddenly surprised by another person’s approach in the corridor. In this moment, the person looking through the keyhole is fully exposed to another’s gaze; as such, they are no longer seeing, but seen. This situation can also be associated with the split or death of a subject, and it also recalls the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who said that we can see our eyes reflected in a mirror, but we can never see our eyes as they really are. In In Between, the person who earnestly looks at the wall—ostensibly the seeing subject—is actually the seen object. In Invisible Masterpiece, the people staring at the blank walls are no longer the subject of their own perception, but objects of our perception. Therefore, by directing our eyes at the faint outlines of other people looking, we enter the network of gazes, thus becoming the objects, rather than the subjects, of sight. In Kim Shinil’s works, the visible and the invisible are not sharply divided, but overlapping, a concept that completely subverts all of our deeply held notions about the act of seeing.

Layering and Erasing Letters
In 2012, Kim participated in a residency program at Seoul Art Space_GeumCheon, where he devoted his efforts to a large work commemorating the Jangchung Gymnasium, an aging athletic and cultural facility that had recently been scheduled for demolition because of structural issues. The Seoul Metropolitan Government had decided to rebuild the gymnasium, but they also wanted to commemorate the historical significance of the original building, so they initiated a project wherein a selected artist would create a work using some of the recycled parts of the demolished arena. Kim Shinil’s proposal was selected, and he created a work that incorporated the steel truss frames of the building. Using the truss frames as supports, he erected a structure consisting of the overlapping English letters of the word “HISTORY.” All the letters were of the same size and they were layered so tightly together that they seemed to have been cast from a single mold. Each letter covered the following letter, making it almost impossible to read the final word, but it could still be discerned upon a close examination of the outlines. This work proclaims history to be a palimpsest, wherein the past is revealed through the present.
Having previously used his embossed drawings, with their faint outlines of people looking at nothing, to explore the boundary between existence and absence, emptiness and the mean, Kim began to turn his attention to the layered letters of his text drawings. One representative work of this type was created for his solo exhibition Decoded Love (2008) at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn. One work from that exhibition consisted of an installation of large letters, carved from polycarbonate, which were so thoroughly layered and overlapped that they were almost impossible to decipher. Notably, however, with concerted effort, the audience could still make some sense out of the letters. Text that is completely impossible to understand implies an insurmountable gap, a total lack of communication, but Kim’s overlapping text drawings do not aim for this level of deconstruction. Because the texts can still be deciphered, the meaning does not simply disappear. Like fingerprints, the traces of the words and their meaning remain on the wall, as if they are in preparation to be decoded. The installation was inspired by a silent film called The Toll of the Sea, one of the first films ever produced in Technicolor. In the film, the protagonist loses her beloved child as a ‘toll to the sea’. By citing this film, Kim was referencing the type of love that has no instructions or explanations. Once love is enunciated, it is defined, but in order to surpass such limited definition, we must focus on the overlapping texts.
Kim Shinil believes that drawings are a type of language. Just as in language, delivery and communication are vital for the visual appeal of drawings. But letters can never deliver meaning perfectly. Therefore, through his letter sculptures, Kim demonstrates the fallacy and misunderstanding that results from our desire to directly interpret letters. Kim once defined his letter structures as a type of formal reduction through analysis. His structures are never accompanied by annotations or explanations, which makes the process of deciphering them a bit uncomfortable. As such, Kim encourages viewers to forego trying to read his works, and to focus instead on simply seeing them. Indeed, the texts cannot be read, because they do not form complete sentences, only mixed-up words and phrases. By disguising their meaning in this way, Kim also leaves them open to various interpretations, which is particularly apparent in his work Duration to Intuition (2010), which references ‘seal script’ calligraphy stamps from China. A horizontal structure of openwork letters hangs from the ceiling, with a mirror on the ground underneath it. Like a calligraphy stamp, the letters are reflected in the mirror, so that the work establishes another relationship between seeing and seen. In fact, rather than simply reflecting the letters, the mirror seems to be almost inhaling them, like some kind of abyss. The mirror also acts as a trap to seduce and imprison our eyes, which sweep across the surface of the mirror trying to decode the letters. Through the surface of the texts, videos of TV commercials are projected, but they cannot be easily viewed due to the different letter sculptures attached to the wall, hanging from the ceiling, or standing up from the ground like a partition. Like the letter sculpture, the videos are further distorted by the mirror. In the end, all that is left of the video are traces of colored light, offering little hope for meaning. Thus, while the border between letters and images is dissolved, the traces left by the letters and images are highlighted. Kim recognizes this deconstruction of the boundary as the emptiness or the mean, and as the absence of absolute meaning.

Returning to the ‘mind’ of this exhibition, the three letter sculptures (‘ideology’, ‘belief’, and ‘mind’) are not sturdily erected in order to represent the value inherent to language itself. Instead they are founded on Kim’s critical thought about the limits of any meaning that relies on linguistic prescription. This perspective is reminiscent of Zen Buddhism, which asserts that some types of revelation can only be achieved through intuitive discernment and spiritual awakening, rather than through words and letters. At any rate, Kim’s works clearly demonstrate how narrow-minded it is to attach belief only to the things we can see. When we subordinate our mind to letters and other manmade symbols, we are only distancing ourselves from the essence of the mind. With his works, Kim problematizes not the mind itself, but the use of letters and words to document the mind; as such, his letter sculptures should not be read with the eyes, but decoded with the mind. The moment that we become satisfied with reading the words that are hidden within his twisted sculptures, the universe of meaning that permeates the exhibition space is again confined to the prison of symbolic language, thus losing its power. When that happens, the eyes might feel victorious, but we are actually compressing the horizon of what we can fully grasp through vision. After all, when we first view the exhibition space through the web-like structures, all that can be seen are three columns made from letters. But of course, the three texts of these sculptures are not the essence, but merely the apparatus that the artist is using to open our minds’ eye. Indeed, opening the minds’ eye is the ultimate goal in Kim Shinil’s works. In order to truly see his works, we must grope through the area that can be seen by the mind’s eye, rather than the physical eye, and search for the fingerprints of vision that have been left behind, marking the site.