Cindy Ji Hye Kim

Trained as an illustrator at the Rhode Island School of Design (2013), Cindy Ji Hye Kim came to painting a few years later, during her MFA at Yale University School of Art (2016). For Kim, illustration sees a painting as an image rather than an object, in contrast to the modernist approach to a painting as a surface for materials. Perceiving this latter art-historical principle as authoritarian, like parents, Kim casts herself as an infantilized illustrator-child, portraying strange psychological situations involving archetypal figures of mother, father, and child, whom the artist has respectively named Madame Earth, Mr. Capital, and The School Girl.

Staging her works within the confines of the MIT List Visual Arts Center’s smallest gallery, Kim engaged the architecture of the space in a variety of eye-catching ways. The center of attraction was the grisaille painting Superego Fortuna (2020), of an interlocking network of floral vines that create the outline of the artist’s Madame Earth figure and a wheel-like shape that also appears in another large canvas titled Yearnings of the Flesh (2019). The backside of Superego Fortuna, rendered in graphite, charcoal, pastel, ink, acrylic, and oil on silk, employs a birchwood structure in the shape of a human pelvis bone in the place of traditional stretcher bars to create a metaphoric portrayal of Fortuna, the Roman goddess of chance who is also associated with female fertility.

The placement of this painting within the space was particularly important. Suspended by wires in the center of the room, it was backed by the commissioned graphite, pastel, and acrylic mural Double-Tongued Citadel (2020), which portrays two sections of white floor-to-ceiling scaffolding, entangled with ropes that form female and male silhouettes—Madame Earth is woven into the structure on the left, Mr. Capital on the right, their figures popping out against the solid black surface of the rest of the wall. Because Superego Fortuna is suspended and lit from behind, the giant wooden pelvis is seen as a haunting shadow from the front of the painting and a formidable silhouette from the rear. On closer examination, the silhouette reveals Mr. Capital, with his signature ten-gallon hat, penetrating a pair of spread female legs—defined by light coming through the vine-covered canvas—with his penis.