Anjali Gupta is an independent critic, editor and video producer based in San Antonio. She is Editor of ARTL!ES, a contemporary art quarterly published in Texas. Her writing has appeared in catalogues and numerous periodicals including tema celeste, Art Papers, Art Asia Pacific and artUS.
If one were to attempt an analogy between evaluating an artist solely via a piece of their portfolio and criminal profiling, the results might be surprising. Both processes are, after all, protracted studies in semiotics. Presented with the documentation of a crime scene (or a work of art), an investigator (or critic) must disengage and assess the nature of the overall scene in order to intuit the perpetrator (or artist’s) primary motivation, character and predilections. Take, for example, Los Angeles-based Anna Kim’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Proliferation Status (2006), a large light box construction that literally and figuratively makes light of a major global crisis. The work depicts a world map rendered in decorative pastel hues with robotic butterflies hovering on its surface. The map’s color code indicates established nuclear superpower status while the insects conglomerate in areas currently engaged in acts of proliferation.
Through this gesture, Kim infuses the migratory patterns of harmless organisms with the potential for causing cataclysmic destruction. Her sublimation of context into codified pretext is at once elegant and absurd. The ironic relationship between the work’s content and presentation is calculated and equally refined: mass destruction reduced to innocuous hues more likely to elicit “oooohs” than “AHHHHs!” Judging from this work alone, Kim would be what criminologists call a “highly organized” serial killer. She is exacting, cautious, seductive; her execution is clinical. As a criminal, she would be difficult to apprehend, and, by the look of things, she is only getting started.
