Los Angeles – For most of us, a digital alarm is our signal to wake up. We cross our day, work after the hours of clarity under fluorescent lights and we commit hours to look at the pixels to move around a screen at night. Cindy Ji Hye Kim's exhibition Sad animal At the François Ghebaly gallery, transports us to an earlier era, inspired by agrarian work cycles illustrated in medieval calendars to reconsider the psychic link between body and earth.
In the front room, the black portraits on a small scale represent pairs in various states of embrace. In “Sad animal” (All Works 2025), the homonym of the exhibition, we see a female figure with its arms rolled up around its lover, its illuminated rib cage from the inside. These calm scenes, the press release tells us, aim to reflect the last remains of winter before the spring equinox, a period of the year associated with seed planting, to stay inside and to wait for crops to develop. This idea is materialized as we continue in the room, where we meet intimate scenes representing a mother and a child, pushing together like a tree and a seed. In “Awakening”, a austere white and blue window divides space, contrasting the dark freshness of domestic hibernation and the welcoming light from spring outside.
The second piece is branched off with birch patterned birch planes that evoke the structure and use of Korean folding screens. Rightly entitled “Primavera”, these frames are engraved with the machine with cherry blossoms which welcome the cycles of Renaissance culture and the harvest of spring. Other works in this room, such as “Fixed Sun”, “Human Design” and “Harvester”, represent male workers harvesting with false, loans in fixed positions which transmit an aggressive and animal – sometimes violent energy. These are counterbalanced by works featuring symbolic feminine forms, such as a snake in “the other half of Eve”, the moon in “Fired Fire”, and a falcon in “The Falcon and the Falconer III”. Together, these archetypes of masculinity and femininity seem to rediscover the stories that have survived today via oral stories, by moving the contemporary attention of the individual to the collective.
As Kim demonstrates in its decisive representations workforce at their most essential moments, our collective unconsciousness has always been linked to the natural cycles of life, no matter how obscure modernity.
Cindy ji hye kim: sad animal Continue to François Ghebaly (2245 East Washington Boulevard, downtown, Los Angeles) until April 19. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
