The Second Bite, 2025
Exhibition Ballet with the Devil at PODIUM, Hong Kong
One Whispered Pleasure, the Other Promised Pain,
2025,
Gold-plated brass, blown glass,
35x35x27cm They Swallowed the Serpent and Called It Prayer,
2025,
Chrome-plated brass, blown glass,
55x15x13cm
Glass fabrication: Park Hyung-Jin
Metal work: Noh Yongwon
3D model: Oh Young Hoon
Photo by Lok Hang Wu
Courtesy of PODIUM, Hong Kong
Honing his expertise in metalsmith and jewellery, Korean artist Dew Kim has been creating metal and blown glass sculptural installations with sharp-witted and sensual aesthetics, maneuvering the notions of eroticism, pleasure, and pain to question religious taboos and human desire. His two new sculptural wall pieces reimagine a metal, phallic erotic toy into a serpent form, alluding to the transformed Satan who tempts Eve with the forbidden fruit. In They Swallowed the Serpent and Called It Prayer (2025), the elongated chrome-plated brass structure, evoking the form of the slithering reptilian, wraps around the glass blob as if constricting a prey to suffocation. Covered in small, organic red dots, the violet blown glass appears to bleed beneath its skin under cruel pressure, awaiting its death call. Yet, Kim’s meticulous manipulation of materials and composition lends such a homicide scene an uncanny, tranquil and even sublime quality. The brass rod bends gracefully into the flowing, sinuous shape of a seductive and tempting figure, while the bruised being, draping in silence, lets out a post-climactic murmur after experiencing the excruciating torture.
One Whispered Pleasure, the Other Promised Pain (2025), the branch-like form, dazzling in liquid gold, invokes the mystical Tree of Knowledge, while the tantalising red glass bulb with a transparent end reimagines the forbidden fruit oozing sweet dewdrops. It is commonly taught in biblical readings that Adam and Eve possessing god-like knowledge and truth brings death and suffering; Kim, however, suggests an alternate interpretation of this prevalent parable that intertwines pleasure and pain, divinity and sin. Despite being scapegoated as the culprit of humanity’s downfall, Eve's act of eating the Forbidden Fruit may not be a symbol of sin but a valuable enlightenment taught by the serpent, who was the first in prelapsarian times to challenge authority and rules. Listening to the whispers of temptation, Eve successfully liberates herself from unquestionable obedience and traverses the grand promises veiled by the 'Tree of Patriarchy', acquiring a crystal clear perception of the cruel reality. Rewriting the Edenic myth through bodily sensation, sacred violation, and the politics of desire, the sculptures become vessels of temptation, penetration, and split ecstasy—where language fails yet the body remembers. / Written by Cusson Cheng