A Thousand Dreaming Plateaus

Dabal Kim's works feature a variety of genres and materials, but the artist herself takes her place as the main axis. There are very few works that reveal the artist's face itself, but many icons are an extension of the ego. In this respect, they fall under self-portrait. Even the landscape is no exception. Drawings, photos, videos, and objects containing landscapes leave traces of the artist in various ways. If the expansion of the subject becomes severe, it becomes fragmented and dismantled, but it is tied together through a dense form. This is a characteristic of the artist. Dabal Kim's representative form is thought to be drawing. Drawing based on surrealistic free association is transformed into animation, and installation. Drawing takes its place as a work within a work and often becomes another place of creation. The drawing by Dabal Kim is a process for creation and variation rather than an exact reproduction of something. This is related to subjectivity in the process. The recent exhibition at the Oil Tank Culture Park puts gender identity on the stage of experimentation on the boundaries of the subject. Strange costumes that imply male/female bisexual mythology are also often worn by the artist. The self-portrait mixed with various images of animals and plants, including red stockings and shoes known as the artist's trademark, asks about the boundaries of the subject.
In Dabal Kim's work, it is the numerous others that achieve the identity. For example, nature, animals and plants, monsters, ruins such as deserts or historic sites, and unknown old objects may at first glance seem like a collection of miscellaneous images without any unity, but all of them can be said to be various images of others outside the subject. The artist expresses herself loosely and freely while making a rhizomatic connection with them. This method is implemented by referring to shamanism, animism, mythology and religion as well as art history through the artist's various cultural experiences. Through this, Dabal Kim expresses not the dogmatic subject typical of modern times, but the mutual subject that is open like a festival through dialogic imagination. Purity is nothing but the ideology of modernism. Dabal Kim actively utilizes modern means such as photography and video, but the ultimate vision is toward the pre-modern or post-modern. Quasi-archaeological images emphasized in the history of disconnection are the inner landscape of the artist and form a unique aura. The world of an artist named Dabal Kim shows that modernism is overcome through embodied language, not through any creed or ideology.

"Thousand Dream Plateaus" draws inspiration from the philosophical concept of "A Thousand Plateaus" by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, exploring a multi-layered and organic world through plateaus that are both independent and interconnected. Rooted in Eastern philosophical concepts of cyclical time and relational thinking, the work delves into the fluidity of existence and spatiality from a diasporic perspective, blurring the boundaries between dreams and reality. The cycle of suffering and enlightenment reflects the impermanence and imperfection of human existence, and each plateau is not fixed but constantly evolving, signifying human connection through change.
In this work, the Buddhist concepts of impermanence and dependent origination are symbolically expressed through the dismantling of boundaries between time, space, humans, nature, dreams, and reality. The film specifically incorporates Hwangudan, a historical space in Korea, as a point of departure for diasporic memory, migration, and the concept of forgetfulness. Hwangudan becomes not just a relic but a "Noah's Ark" representing the reconstructed "home" of the diasporic existence, raising the question, "How does what is forgotten sustain us?" Through the intertwining of history and self, past and present, this work explores the essence of human existence through a journey that transcends boundaries, forging new connections.