Kim Joon creates digital prints focusing on themes of desire, memory and fragility. He uses the human body as his canvas, superimposing tattoos on hyperrealistic flesh fabricated using three-dimensional modeling and rendering software. The artist has long been preoccupied with tattoos, a social taboo in Korean society, which he uses as metaphors for unconscious desires.

 

The three headless “skinned” nudes in Ebony–Tiger also address conflicting forces of identity in Korea’s increasingly Westernized culture. The more recent work in the exhibition, Crush 02, an elaborate tableaux of limbs covered in exotic skins interspersed with serially manufactured automobile parts, deftly celebrates and questions society’s obsession with luxury, commodification and loss of individuality in the era of globalization. 

 

Kim Joon’s works have been exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery, London, where his work was featured on the cover of Korean Eye: Contemporary Korean Art, the book that accompanied the exhibition of the same name; Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea; and the National Taiwan Museum.

 

Born in Seoul, 1966 | Lives and works in Seoul