SEATTLE.- The Henry Art Gallery presents the exhibit Threshold: Byron Kim 1990-2004 through September 17. Asian American artist Byron Kim burst on the art scene in the 1993 Whitney Biennial with Synecdoche, a remarkable multi-panel work that defined a new approach to painting. This grid of hundreds of 8x10-inch panels, each painted a single hue of peach, beige, or brown, represented the skin tone of many individual sitters Kim had painted from life. Now numbering 400 panels, identified by the subject’s name and arranged alphabetically, Synecdoche is both abstract and representational, both conceptual and emotionally inflected. Although Synecdoche seems to belong equally to opposed genres of painting—the abstract and the figurative—it in fact occupies a unique position between the two, what the artist calls a “threshold”. This exhibition, the first museum survey of this insightful artist, explores four bodies of monochrome painting that occupy that meaningful territory.

Color in its various aspects—as fact, as signifier, and as metaphor—continues to dominate Kim’s work. Threshold includes small canvases whose colors pinpoint particular events and places in his childhood, such as Miss Mushinski (First Big Crush), 1996, and 1984 Dodge Wagon, 1994; a series based on celadon pottery of Asia (Koryo Green Glaze #1, 1995 –96); and wall-sized landscapes inspired by poet William Wordsworth (I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, 1997). His Sunday Paintings—sky studies that form a personal journal—include notations of place and sometimes the addition of text, suggesting how painting can serve as a kind of personal journal for the artist.