Hakgojae Shanghai is pleased to announce Mari Kim’s first solo exhibition in China, Forgotten Promises from 29th of May to 5th of July, 2015.

Pop Art conscientize emotions of modern people by reenacting popular imagery such as advertisement, label, cartoon, film, photograph, etc. Moreover, Pop Art crosscurrents the abstract expressionism, which is called as universal characteristic of contemporary art and solemnity that asks for philosophical introspection, seeks for future oriented art that is open-minded and newly born every moment, derailing from the norms of formalized art. Therefore, Pop Art contains daily images that are excluded from scope of traditional fine art, and has been creating a heterogeneous world that are mixed with diverse concepts—materialism and spirit, high culture and pop culture, heaviness and lightness, reality and illusion, internal and external, etc. Recent Pop Art especially has been combining rapidly developing technology and media through computers and has been evolved into a form of virtual realism composed of a cartoon, painting, and technology.

Mari Kim actively accepts the outcomes of the generation and creates her own unique images from it. By producing music video Hate You of a famous female K-pop leading idol group, 2NE1, the artist and her own character, named “Eyedoll”; following the same pronunciation of the word ‘Idol,’ started to gain popularity worldwide. The original meaning of the term ‘idol’ is an icon of worship. In a traditional meaning, idol implies a “replica” that people artificially made from the image of the God. In Kim’s artworks, cloned girls named “Eyedoll” appear with different styles of make-up. Each cloned girls insists herself as original work, yet their faces have been created through the same process like factory-made robots and Barbie dolls. It can be interpreted as simulacra, which means replications without an original work according to Jean Baudrillard. In the world of simulacrum, replication itself becomes the original work. In other words, an idol becomes a god.