Minjung Kim studied with the key proponent of the Dansaekhwa movement, Park Seo-Bo, in Seoul in the early 1980s. She subsequently became one of the few female artists associated with the male-dominated school. Born in Gwangju, Kim is now living and working between the south of France and the United States. Although she has been featured extensively in exhibitions throughout Europe and the US, Kim is less known in the United Kingdom. Her exhibition, “The Memory of Process,” presented at White Cube Mason’s Yard, was her first with the gallery. The show operated as a comprehensive survey, highlighting the strength and breadth of Kim’s explorations with serene, minimal geometries and her techniques of modularity and repetition.   

Grouped together in the upstairs space was an arrangement of conceptual, mixed-media works made by Kim in the mid-2000s. These abstract canvases are made of traditional Korean hanji paper, which is processed from dried mulberry tree bark. The artist burns the edges of the paper with a very small candle or incense stick and then begins to layer them in strips with a technique akin to collage. The process is very labor intensive, allowing Kim—who describes her own work as “a visualization of Zen and Tao”—to fall into a meditative state. As in a ritual, mind and body are connected through the repeated acts of cutting, burning and gluing. Despite using mathematical rigor, the vegetal material is ultimately shaped into organic forms Kim imagines, including spirals, as in Nautilus (2010), or bamboo canes, seen in Bambu (2005). The hanji is pale, almost translucent, and only up close can the viewer see the individual nuances of each work, or the darkened edges where the fragments have been burnt. The material is thus caught in a moment of vanishing, both present and absent, with its transience preserved.