Kim Joon, Bird Land - Swarovski & Tattooress Man, 2008

Kim Joon, Bird Land - Swarovski, 2008.

Chromigenic Print, 40 x 40 inches, 101.6 x 101.6 cm. Edition 10/10. Signed on label on verso. Estimate: from $9,000 to $11,000

Kim Joon, Tattooress Man, 2008.

Chromigenic Print, 40 x 40 inches, 101.6 x 101.6 cm. Edition 8/8. Signed on label on verso. Estimate: from $9,000 to $11,000

Notes: "I am interested in tattoo as a metaphor for hidden desire or a kind of compulsion engraved into human consciousness. I see the skin, or in some cases the monitor, as an extension of a canvas. My earlier tattoo paintings were 3 dimensional canvases in the form of lumps of flesh or parts of a body, such as a muscular arm. Tattoos can reflect individual and collective reality or displaced desire. " - Kim Joon

Korean-born artist Kim Joon photographs elegant configurations of nude bodies, embracing, huddling, congregating, sometimes as if copulating, with occasional profusions of additional limbs emerging, all the while the bodies are elaborately embellished with swirling, waving, coiling, often traditional patterns, framing corporate logos and other symbols in a shamanistic choreography. Kim Joon plays on the notion of branding as a means of asserting identity or possession or some psychic presence, as with modern corporations seeking to lodge an unmistakable aura of their products and services in the minds of consumers, or the act of burning the owner’s mark into the hides of cattle, or a pantheistic evocation of the forces of nature. The decorative color combinations, tattoo imagery, and digital intrusions are tempered by the palpability of human flesh, which he often pock marks to give its soft vulnerable texture added bite.

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