The Al Held Foundation and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College are pleased to present Verses on Oxherding, a solo exhibition by Jenny Jisun Kim, the current Al Held Archive Fellow. This exhibition of 14 new paintings and a site-specific installation was informed by research in the Al Held Foundation’s archive.
The project draws from the classical Zen Buddhist Ten Oxherding Pictures, a parable of spiritual search traditionally rendered in ten poems and illustrations depicting a boy’s journey of taming an ox. In Kim’s version, she expands the cycle to 14 stages, aligning each with one of the consonants of the Korean alphabet. The artist’s research in Held’s archive focused on his preparatory drawings for the “Alphabet Paintings” series from the 1960s. Kim was drawn to the way Held treated text as a formal system, continually pushing against the threshold where linguistic meaning begins to slip—finding that line between legibility and abstraction. Kim’s paintings explore similar shifts; they are both iterative and fragmentary, leaning into the ambiguity of mark-making and the instability of linguistic signs. Kim is an artist and translator based in Union City, NJ, and a recent graduate of Bard’s MFA program.