Back in Feb 2020, I was lucky to visit @kimchihey’s studio in an unlikely borough of NYC and get a peek at the new body of work she was preparing for her EU solo debut. Well, it turns out that 2 and half years later, the Korean-born and US-based artist is opening her 1st EU institutional exhibition at @kunsthall_stavanger, which is continuing onto the work I've seen at the studio back then. And being a big fan of her work and the quaint "oil capital" of Norway, this presentation comprising paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and a site-specific mural hits different. • In the ongoing body of work #CindyJiHyeKim has been developing, she's exploring the formal qualities of paintings - the grisaille palette and the stretcher bars while playing with the concept of the hidden and the unseen. Whether working on semi-transparent silk organza, turning the stretchers into part of a painting or a self-containing sculpture, or now transforming the easel into a part of a large installation, she is interested in researching what she recognizes as the "duty" of an artist. "The act of trying to represent the unconscious is maddening because it gives the illusion of some sort of understanding at the end," she told me in the conversation we had back then, and the new exhibition seems to be continuing onto that notion by allowing the viewers to quite literally walk through what's otherwise considered as flat, wall artwork. • For an artist that is attracted to graphite for its "banal and ubiquitous" nature, I find it profound that she's exhibiting the work in a region whose existence depends on another form of carbon - oil. Especially when knowing that the work speaks about the traditional values and expectations within the capitalism-rooted society she grew up in through the interaction of the 3 main characters - the housewife mother, the capitalist father, and the schoolgirl child. "The cycle of arousal and repulsion towards fate becomes the eternal task for the schoolgirl," Kim told me back in 2020, adding a prophetic element to this exhibition as she herself advances in that direction as relentlessly as the Sand in the Hourglass • All photos via #KunsthallStavanger