On a Field of Wild Glyphs
Installation view, Jenny Jisun Kim:Verses on Oxherding, 2025, Al Held Foundation. Photo courtesy of Jenny Jisun Kim.
The Korean alphabet-inspired paintings in Jenny Jisun Kim’s Verses on Oxherding, on view at the Al Held Foundation, transport me to a time before I learned how to write. Before I learned to attach sounds and senses to written letters, they must have appeared to me like these images: alien, radiant, abstract, inviting narrative; like wild oxen, untamed.
Kim’s exhibition draws from the canonical Zen Buddhist painting series, the Ten Oxherding Pictures, a visual and poetic parable likening the discovery, domestication, and loss of an ox to the spiritual journey towards Zen emptiness. In six of these ten pictures, the ox is visually absent: it either dwells in the ox-seeker’s imagination or has already transcended into Nothingness, along with the ox-herder, who frees himself from his own desire to possess.
Jenny Jisun Kim, Carried, 2025, Acrylic, gouache, graphite, and pigment on linen, 20 x 20 inches. Photo courtesy of Jenny Jisun Kim.
The eighth picture of the canon consists only of an empty circle. Kim’s exhibition straddles text and image much in the same way the circle straddles the figurative and the abstract—a representation of the empty ox pen, a visualization of nothingness, or a canvas ready to be filled.
The fourteen consonants of the Korean alphabet, called Hangul, appear and disappear like wild animals in her fourteen paintings. Circular figures recur throughout her collection, central especially to the piece Carried (2025), a verdant allusion to the Zen circle, evoke the letter ㅇ; square canvases evoke the letter ㅁ. The elaborate perpendicular angles in Field of Departure (2025) mimic the letter ㄱ, the first Hangul consonant, and itself, a point of departure for the alphabetical sequence.
Jenny Jisun Kim,The Hand of the Ordinary, 2025. Conte, gouache, ink, pigment, watercolor, and wood stain on linen, 20 x 20 inches. Photo courtesy of Jenny Jisun Kim.
But, like a beast fleeing the herder, these text-like images—or, afterimages of text—also slip away from such direct equivalences. While the angular gestures in The Hand of the Ordinary (2025) converge into the letter ㅍ, they also extend and clasp onto one another like crisscrossing beams of an abstracted house, fading behind a mythical landscape of colorful waves, scales, and mist. The letter ㄷ consists of three straight lines, but Marks (2025) renders it into three darkened corners of the canvas—within, a spectral figure lingers: an ox-seeker, an ox-herder, or perhaps something else entirely.
Apparitions of sound exist in Kim’s images as well. Yellow strokes in Nothing Given (2025) float like the breathy consonant ㅎ [h], while flickering with an intensity that such a soft aspirate sound cannot contain. Short, rhythmic strokes in Figure (2025) seem to visualize the ㄹ [r] sound, which vibrates like a field stampeded by oxen. Hands, moons, clouds, ledges, bridges, pebbles, rain, grass: objects and their narratives roam and fade freely in this exhibition, appropriately titled Verses on Oxherding—rhyming rather than describing or equating.
Jenny Jisun Kim, Figure, 2025. Acrylic, conte, gouache, oil, watercolor, and wood stain on linen, 20 x 20 inches. Photo courtesy of Jenny Jisun Kim.
A translator of Korean literature, Kim tells a story of translation, a journey rife with almost-equivalences and encounters with untranslatability, and alludes to the history of the Korean language, whose phonetic alphabet is one of the few writing systems with a known inventor. When Sejong the Great created Hangul in 1443, he designed each character to represent a speech organ pronouncing the corresponding sound: for instance, the letter ㄱ, which represents a guttural [g] sound, looks like the shape of the tongue in a cross-section of the throat when pronounced. By exploring the pictorial possibilities of Hangul consonants, Kim also returns to their mimetic beginnings. Like the artist, the inventor himself would have had to sketch or paint these letters before he could translate the shapes into a closed system of linguistic signs.
Before I could begin to write letters on the page, I had to learn how to draw them. Kim’s exhibition makes me wish that I, like the ox-herder, could briefly forget how to write, so that I could once more encounter my alphabets in their untamed strangeness, watching and sketching them as I might a stranger’s mouth.
Sighting (2025), a three-dimensional piece accompanying the paintings, invites me across time and space into that wilderness preceding language. A vertically installed rope, Sighting is perhaps the Zen circle untied, an ox pen hanging wide open. All the glyphs I have tamed, whose unruly curves and colors I have learned to unsee, come here to graze, and I am ready to see them as if for the first time.
Jenny Jisun Kim, Marks, 2025. Graphite, ink, and wood stain on linen, 20 x 20 inches. Photo courtesy of Jenny Jisun Kim.
Jenny Jisun Kim: Verses on Oxherding is on view at the Al Held Foundation from June 14 through June 27, 2025.
