Emptying the figure,
arriving at balance

Kim Reisi did not begin in abstraction. She began in figuration — learning, through Western painting at Seoul Women's University, how to construct a form, how to hold a composition together, how to make a surface resolve into something legible. That structural discipline was the foundation on which everything else was built.

Advanced study abroad — at Nottingham Trent University in the UK, then at Pratt Institute in New York — deepened the practice while shifting its centre. The move toward abstraction was not a break with figuration but a continuation: having learned what form can do, she began to explore what form, released from representation, reveals. Line freed from the object becomes a line that records the inner state — its speed, its weight, its wavering. The painting became a surface for the act of being present.

The central gesture of Kim Reisi's practice is simple and bodily: a hand raised, a sweep through the air, a line drawn. In that act, she has written, the self is found — not in the meaning of the mark but in the proof of it. The line says: I was here; this moment happened. Its fading does not erase the act.

On the canvas this becomes a process of accumulation. Lines fill the surface; the surface is partially or wholly covered; new lines are laid down. Over time, layers build up — each layer holding a different moment, all the moments held at once in the finished painting. This simultaneity is deliberate. Where sequential accumulation might suggest a narrative — this came before that — her method insists that every moment is already complete in itself. No layer is more or less present than any other.

The result is painting that embodies balance not as symmetry but as the equal weight of all the instants it contains. Each stroke is both a record and a release — the inner state expressed, then covered, then re-expressed in a new form. The surface accumulates toward an equilibrium that is never fixed, always in process.

Kim Reisi's practice does not end with the self. To look inward through painting — to find the “I” inscribed in each mark — is, paradoxically, to open outward. The experience of facing oneself in the act of drawing, her practice suggests, inevitably leads to attending to the moments of others: to everyone who breathes alongside, close but separated, each existing in their own moment.

This is the ethical dimension of her abstract practice. The painting in colour and line does not illustrate a philosophy of connection; it is the act of connection, repeated with each gesture. The coexistence of all the layers — all the moments, all the selves — on a single canvas surface is a model for how beings exist together: distinct, simultaneous, mutually present. Her work reaches toward the recognition that others are no different from oneself.