WHAT
The Korean artist’s debut exhibition with Perrotin is a presentation of paintings from the last fifteen years that examine the theme of reverence of nature and its circulation. The essential themes encompassing his oeuvre are ‘nature’ and ‘temporality’. Shim continuously strives to pursue the quest for how to perceive and express them with the infinite possibilities of arts beyond the standardised genres and media. The effect of the different hues in his blue paintings (by repeated brushstrokes) creates the nuances of the erased, hidden, revived, and exposed parts. The repetition of physical behaviour and the coexistence of time and space sensations forges metaphors that suggest many possibilities.

WHY
Through his lifelong quest for ‘nature’ and ‘temporality’, the artist seeks to find the context for an object to become sculpture and its reason to exist, rather than merely focusing on the form of the sculpture itself. Through minimal artistic intervention, he has expressed inherent properties of the materials revealing over time, relational dialogue between different materials, and the interaction with environmental circumstances. Having spent over forty years exploring the inherent properties of materials as a sculptor, he has now borrowed landscapes from his hometown of Tongyeong, and expanded the spirit of ‘anti-sculpture’ through paintings.