plastik - horse Sculpture

The Plastic Chair Woojin Kim, who used to dream of being an animal breeder, expresses dreams and hope-like stories using plastic chairs. Woojin Kim’s main artwork material is plastic; it is light and easily fabricated. Because it does not easily corrode, it is used for various purposes in place of metal, wood and glass. Moreover, Plastic is strong, light and it can be mixed with other compounds to make any color required. It also can be molded into any form once heated. However, this material did play a role in the making of an image of a poor substitute. Woojin Kim uses plastic chairs of primary colors, which best express such characteristics as his art's material. Chairs are objects that comfort people by allowing them an alternative position of sitting rather than standing or lying down to rest their tired muscles. In ancient Egypt, however, chairs weren't objects to rest on but a symbol of power and authority that was used only be aristocrats and social elites. In a plastic chair, none of this comfort or authoritarian power can be found. The mass produced chair is hard and uncomfortable and it highlights the functional side than the aesthetic. Woojin Kim explores the chair, a standardized product that is mass-produced by technology and machine, beyond the meaning as a choice of objet d’art to a new formativeness by dismantling and reconstructing the objet. The grouping of the dismantled plastic chair’s pieces reminds one of Pablo Picasso’s artistic figural. If Picasso dismantled and reconstructed the nature’s form to a geometrical one, Woojin Kim reconstructs the subject’s form with the dismantled pieces of the chair. The dismantled pieces of chair are connected in a constructional manner in his artwork. The pieces connect and form a sturdy outline of his subject; the animal’s anatomical expression; i.e. the animal’s face, body and tail. The Pieces’ Color Façade If the artwork’s form is a connection of the dismantled, its colors are closers to being abstract; it does not resemble the actual colors of the animal. Mass produced plastic chairs come often in red, blue or green. As Woojin Kim uses the mass-produced objects, as it is, red, blue and green harmoniously fills his artworks façade. The plastic chair is pieced in accordance to the color façade and is re-created to animals we know well such as deer, horse, sheep, etc. The passion, wisdom, and life symbolized by red, blue and green accordingly, makes the animal’s form stand out even more. The primary colored animal’s form created by red, blue or green plastic pieces does not make the artwork look distracted nor does it interfere with one’s recognition of the animal’s form. This is because the pieces are partially colored black to make the pieced color façades look connected. As all the artwork’s pieces are partially colored black, even though the colors are primary and do not represent the actual colors of the subject, it does not distract the audiences view. This addition of black blocks the distraction caused by the lightness of the plastic chair and the intensity of primary colors. The primary colors look coherent, as though it was of a single color, by the black color that flows through the entire artwork. The Animal Breeder Deborah Butterfield, renown as a female animal sculptor, loved horses as a child and continued to study veterinary medicine until she was twenty, from which she began creating artworks on horses. Her interest in animals became her subject of art. Woojin Kim, like Deborah Butterfield, dreamed of becoming an animal breeder when he was young; and his attention and love of animals motivate him to sculpture animals that catch his attention. Although the two artists are alike in that their subjects are their interest in animals and they both used materials that can be easily acquired, unlike Butterfield who limits herself to a specific animal, Woojin Kim expresses his unique physicality and aesthetic sense in the forms of horse, reindeer, sheep and other animals. Woojin Kim’s plastic chair pieces re-create animals’ forms. Re-creation involves the relation between the subject and the image. There are two different methods of re-creation in the specific re-creation of a particular subject, that is, in similarity; there is the similarity in the external form of the subject and the internal similarity, which is the psychical re-creation. Both the physical and psychical similarities can be found in Woojin Kim’s artwork. As tens of pieces find their right places that fit the anatomical form of the animal, the animal’s form is connected by small surfaces. Although Woojin Kim’s animals are simplified in their physicality, they are precise anatomically which gives the audience the feeling that the artwork can live and move about. Externally it is a combination of simplified surfaces but that is enough external similarity. Woojin Kim’s re-creation of animals have more psychical re-creation that the external. Horse, goat, sheep and more that Woojin Kim creates are animals he wants to breed. The psychical similarity begins here. The process of completing an animal sculpture for Woojin Kim is like the process of breeding the animal. As he fits his attention and love for animals through the plastic pieces, it is as what an animal breeder, his dream as a child, would do. The animals Woojin Kim wants to create are not objective animals but animals that he wished to breed; animals that carry his hopes and dreams. To Woojin Kim, the work process of dismantling the plastic chairs into pieces, re-connecting them into an animal’s form, and lining the red, blue and green primary colors with black is like creating his dream by connecting each and every one of his hopes. His dream to become an animal breeder as a child is fulfilled now as a sculptor.