Below is a post I wrote two years ago just as the COVID era was taking ground, dated Friday, May 1, 2020
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I wrote earlier about textile designer Chung-Im Kim, who teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design:
Kim's designs are a combination of these "deconstructed-reconstructed" works of postmodern art and works that reference her Korean/Asian background.As an artist, when I embarked on a new, and challenging, art discipline, I took time out from the normal in-class instructions and went out into the outside world to research, and understand, this new discipline.
I had just finished at Ryerson University, not graduating, but completing what I had set out to do: study, understand, and create films and photographs. My films (and videos) were exhibited in various galleries around Toronto, and including in exhibitions in France. And I had compiled a large collection of works based on a variety of photographic methods.
One method that intrigued me was silk screening, or more precisely, working on textiles. I did my first screen prints, which I titled Toronto Gables, in a small silk screen laboratory, with make-shift lights and printing boards, in one of the program's photography labs.
When I left Ryerson, I started looking for ways to advance this knowledge, including taking workshops in a downtown member-run centre Open Studio. And soon after, I started taking courses in the Ontario College of Art and Design's continuing studies program, for textile art, and specifically, repeat pattern techniques. I took the same course for four consecutive sessions, paying the $200/course fee. Kim was the instructor for all, as I describe here.
As I wrote here:
I wondered later why she [Kim] never introduced us to the endless list of "white" designers. All artists, however limited their education, at some point come across some textiles which are too breathtaking to ignore. I don't think she was intellectually limited. Nor can she use the "excuse" that she is an immigrant. She had lived in Canada by then too many years to not even have casually wandered across some of these works.Kim did leave something behind, though, which became a source of investigation for me.
I believe it was (is) this inherent dislike of whites. Perhaps not individual whites, and certainly not the leftist whites which now make up Canada and America who hate "whites" or white civilization themselves, but the white people as a collective, the white civilization, the white mind.
Kim's designs are a combination of these "deconstructed-reconstructed" works of postmodern art and works that reference her Korean/Asian background.
I had been to visit Kim's exhibition in Toronto, and saw a group of her textile works, including the two below.
'meditating'
1998
78" x 31"
industrial felt, silk dupioni,
fibre reactive dye,
silkscreen printing,
machine & hand stitching
'following tradition'
1999
78" x 23"
industrial felt, handmade felt, fibre reactive dye,
machine & hand stitching
I think the one that initially struck me was Meditating. It looked like the waxing and waning of a moon, but rather than depict an actual waxing and waning, Kim flattened this moon-like structure. And rather than flip the "reflective" image - the orange moon-structure, starting with the "flattened" first and ending with the full round one, to give the image a more interesting dynamic - Kim left each side of the "progression" of the structure the same.
The second image that struck me was Following Tradition. It looks like a take on the maple leaf, or some kind of leaf, once again with a mirror image that is not quite a mirror image, of shapes that are not quite leaves. Perhaps "tradition" means the Canadian "tradition" of maple leaves.
I thought seriously about why a skilled textile designer could not make clear and concrete images.
As I write here:
Their [Kim's] ethnic references are too far away, and they are too alienated from their current country [Canada], and all that is left is the "structure" of the image: its shape, its empty outline.I think this population, responding to false and exaggerated reports on a virus that hardly can be called a pandemic, is the result of an incredible, alienated, "multicultural" legacy, where cultures have no language with which to speak to each other, to denounce falshoods, and attacks on their well-being.
And how do you dare say the government is a liar if your existence depends on the government, and did so prior to such a societal event? Even as they suffer, these good "Canadians" still believe the government WILL save them, and those that have any inklings of a doubt are told by everyone and everything around them to just keep quiet.
But I believe a third group is the opportunistic ones, who have come to depend on grants and funds for their art projects which otherwise not see the light of day.
They cannot tell the truth, otherwise they incur the wrath of this government, which gives them the easy money they have become experts at acquiring, and are on various committees and organizations which look out for them, and for each other. These same people could "snitch" on them. Truth-telling becomes a dangerous sport (and art).
For all their fervent "anti-establishment" and "anti-[Canadian]tradition work," they are dependent on "government," and carefully glean what art will displease this government and what will not, and work accordingly.
It takes courage, and independent thinking, to go against this grain, including to say "I don't want your money."
Or, "I don't believe your story."
Welcome to the Multi-Culti-COVID-Era.
Steve Heinemann, Chung-Im Kim's "partner," contemplating eternity while self isolating,
from a post I wrote here