SUBLIME SIMULACRA
Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present Sublime Simulacra, a group exhibition featuring works by Kim Yun Shin, Kim Chang Euk, Hong Soun, and Scott Kahn.
January 22 - March 15, 2025
In Sublime Simulacra, the landscape serves as an inflection point for new modes of perception. The ultimate reality of images was first contested by Plato, who theorized that all representations can be categorized as one of two types: exact (“truthful”) reproductions or deliberately distorted (“false”) likenesses. Jean Baudrillard’s seminal 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation expanded upon Plato’s theory by introducing the notion of the simulacrum, defined as an imitation that fails to make reference to its original. In postmodern artistic discourse, simulacra are typically conceptualized as representations of representations—copies based on other copies—that do not derive from empirical experience, thus blurring the line between the actual and the imaginary.
This fundamental inability to distinguish objective reality from subjective representation informs much of postmodernist thought, which polemicizes the mediation of the real through simulacra. According to Baudrillard, the apotheosis of this phenomenon occurs when a representation is so lifelike that it creates its own reality, or hyperreality, effectively destroying the hegemony of the real and rewiring the cognitive connection between perception and belief.
Sublime Simulacra repudiates negative connotations associated with simulacra and embraces broader interpretations of the term as it relates to artistic engagement with the landscape. Through the visual languages of organic abstraction, geometric figuration, realism and surrealism, the paintings on view propose variable relationships between images and the realities they represent, in direct correlation to each artist’s conceptual stance and creative process. By reexamining the dialectics of simulacra through the lens of the landscape, this exhibition spotlights depictions of the ineffable as consummate expressions of authenticity.
Whenever the sensory response evoked by the totality of the landscape overwhelms normal perception and approaches the inconceivable, Baudrillard’s dialectics of simulacra collapse under the weight of the transcendent sublime. Given the practical impossibility of reproducing the moment-to-moment impressions that lend the landscape its essential ineffability, it is no wonder that artists abandon the notion of objective authenticity in their representations of the natural environment—they are compelled to break certain rules that differentiate reason and imagination, forging simulacra that recreate reality on their own terms and invite the viewer to share in this “unreal” experience.