One enters a space a triangular tent and finds oneself standing on a floor of distorting mirrors and beneath an illusion of the starry night sky, The Place That The Seeds of Light Grow, as the work is called. Unexpectedly, one has become part of the cosmos: as much a part of the night sky as the anonymous figures contours of light that float in it. For Wheiza Kim, these figures are symbols of enlightenment: they have literally become light, and lost their substance. They are all transparent aura: the night sky the infinitely beyond is visible through them. To enter one of Kim's triangular spaces is a magical experience: one feels weightless and buoyant one has the sensation of floating, with no fear of falling. One has ascended to heaven, but is not dead: one seems, indeed, to have to become a higher" consciousness. Kim's works exist to induce this experience of a higher consciousness a sense of transcendental experience, or what Abraham Maslow calls a peak experience. The triangle represents such an experience, especially an equilateral triangle a symbol of balance, unity, and concentration absolute poise and self-possession. Each of its points is an emblematic peak or apex of consciousness. The triangle and often the triangle within the triangle is the more or less constant form of Kim's works, whether paintings or installations. One is invited to contemplate the triangle, and its contents to pass through the portal it forms and enter a spiritual world, that is, the natural world transformed by enlightened, higher consciousness into a revelation. Thus, in Transient Existence and Each His Own Perception, a beautiful, frail flower becomes, in effect, an eternal soul. The mortal flower is like the immortal pearl in the proverbial oyster, which in Kim's works is a womblike triangle. The colors of the flowers re-appear in the diffuse space between the inner and outer triangles, which forms a natural backdrop to the supernatural experience of the inner flower. Similarly, the lozenge of Overcoming Endless Remnants is essentially two triangles back to back. In the central triangle is a woman's head, framed by a white triangle, which becomes an aura emblematic of her struggle to achieve higher consciousness. She exists in stark contrast to the surging red sky that surrounds her: she is a kind of beacon in the passionate space it forms a symbol of spiritual determination in the midst of the indeterminate clouds. Again and again, the center is the place of overcoming of self-centering and focus in the midst of a limitless void. The center is a place of transformation and enlightenment, the quiet center of an emotional storm, the alembic in which the enigmatic essence of existence is distilled from natural appearance, in which becoming is turned into pure being by spiritual consciousness. Thus, when one of the many birds in The Nest of Illusory Birds enters the central triangle, as thought captured in a spiritual net, it becomes sublimely real. The same thing happens to the butterflies and the gras in From All Trivial Thing. Suddenly brought into sharp focus in the central triangle, butterfly and grass no longer seem part of the transient flow of life, but rather absolute presences. Kim does not always use the triangle-within-the-triangle format. In On This Gloomy Spring Day she uses a rectangle-within-a-rectangle. In this extended work, the center is a window sometimes "literally" onto another, more spiritual world than the everyday one, however much this inner spiritual world resembles the outer natural world that surrounds it. There is an overlap, but also a crucial difference. In the central area, bird, flower, tree, human figures become radically transformed. This is signaller explicitly by the human figures; like the figure in the triangular tent installation Everyday, He Leaves From Himself, they are essentialized into pure form, usually luminous. But sometimes the figures become shadows, as in variation six of This Gloomy Spring Day. I regard this work as crucial, for it seems to reveal Kim's ambivalence toward existence, and her struggle to transform it into something it into something spiritual. As she has written, she often "flips back and forth between doubt and resolution hope and despair...hanging on tight the hwadu." The ambivalence and struggle are at their most dramatic and intense in the remarkable The Awakened, Barren Winter Tree. Here, the dead tree comes to spiritual life. Its ghostly whiteness symbolizes the nothingness of death, but also, at the same time, spiritual illumination spiritual awakening. The miraculous tree is at once barren and radiant materially dead but spiritually vital. Like the biblical burning bush, it has spiritual presence beyond its material existence. Kim's tree is a true revelation-artistic proof of the miracle of spiritual transformation. Wheiza Kim's works symbolize her aspiration her quest for spiritual enlightenment. They symbolize the process of achieving it and the change in perception and consciousness it brings with it. Committed to the Yogacara Buddhist Theory of the Eight Levels of Consciousness, Kim's art tries to symbolize these levels. To ascend form the lowest to the highest is to discover one's true, essential nature and to leave behind one's false, material nature. In other words, the nature in Kim's pictures is symbolic of Kim's nature, and the transformation of nature she depicts symbolizes her self-transformation. The triangle represents the "harmony and perfection" she would like to achieve, the butterfly is the liberated self she dreams of becoming. All her works are in fact dreams of salvation, in which natural beauty becomes the starting point for the discovery of spiritual beauty. Kim in fact recognizes it in her art, which suggests that she is in fact "saved," at least as an artist.
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