Koh San Keum Korea, b. 1966

Koh San Keum responds to the moment when she is mesmerized by books and sentences the artist has personally read which have always fueled her thoughts. The selective sentences and groups of sentences that she is particularly responsive to and mediates, are regarded the unique identity and the essence of the artist philosophy. In the process of converting texts consumed as social symbols, such as novel,  newspaper, poetry, essays and law books into material objects, as tiny artificial pearls are placed according to the number of letters and spaces in between the letters in a fixed and minimal arrangement. In this manner, the semantic context of the sentence is concealed, shedding light on the visual sense of formation and aesthetic impression created by her imagination, energy, and arrays by pearls. Koh’s work involves a heavily labor-intensive process in which the artist herself arranges tens of thousands of artificial pearls on the panels that also become similar to the surface of ivory through repeated painting and sanding of acrylic paint, one by one. Converted into a pearl, the text emancipates itself at last from its obligation to function as a symbol, and becomes something that is post-national and post-ethnic.