IN THE SCENTED FOREST: K BLICK

'My Nine-Tailed Fox smells the scent of the sky, hears the wind, feels the pulse of the universe, and experiences joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure—all on her own terms.'

- K Blick

In The Scented Forest

K Blick’s solo exhibition, In The Scented Forest, at Upsilon Gallery Milan draws inspiration from the Korean legend of the nine-tailed fox, or Gumiho—one of the most intricate and enduring figures in East Asian folklore. The artist takes this narrative as both a point of departure and a conceptual framework, translating it into a deeply contemporary visual language that intertwines human, social, and natural themes.

The Gumiho embodies a complex weave of mysticism, desire, danger, and allure. Its legend, rooted in the ancient Three Kingdoms Period (7th–1st century BC), tells of a creature able to shift between fox and human form—a liminal being, poised between fascination and unease. The Gumiho’s nine tails symbolise the accumulation of power, wisdom, and spiritual force. In East Asian traditions, the number nine is considered sacred, representing not simple completion but the state beyond it, the highest point of attainment; accordingly, the fox’s tails become an emblem of immortality. Another key symbol is the “fox bead,” a glowing orb said to contain her life force and magical power, sometimes imagined as a vessel for absorbing or exchanging human energy. Behind the mask of danger of the fox, however, lies a profound yearning: the desire to become human, to cross the threshold that separates instinct from consciousness, and to find belonging. From this longing arises her broken cry, an expression of eternal restlessness, intrinsic to her ambivalent nature, at once animal and insatiably human.

K Blick reinterprets this tension as a universal metaphor for transformation. Through paintings and ceramics, she constructs a visual universe in which the human, the animal, and the natural coexist in fragile harmony. The gallery becomes a symbolic landscape—an immersive realm where the story is both renewed and inverted: What if the fox never wished to become human? What if her truth lay precisely in her wild, primal nature?

From this question unfolds a broader reflection on the relationship between humanity and nature. In a world dominated by human order, K Blick imagines an alternative balance—one in which nature prevails and all hierarchies, social, gendered, and biological, dissolve. Her paintings and ceramics move between figuration and abstraction, between reality and imagination, giving form to a narrative, compelling language that pulses with emotional intensity. The tears of the nine-tailed fox seem to envelop the gallery walls, filling the voids of contemporary existence—the very spaces that, now more than ever, define the human condition.

In contemporary Korean culture, the Gumiho has evolved beyond its traditional association with danger to become a symbol of tragic beauty and endurance—an eternal being suspended between two worlds. Its story speaks of transformation, desire, and loss, but also of the fragile boundary that unites and separates humanity and animality: a threshold that K Blick traverses with poetic and radical sensitivity.