After emigrating from South Korea to the United States a decade ago, Kyung Kim studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received her MFA from the Pratt Institute in New York last spring. She still misses the mountains near her childhood home, and her abstract landscape paintings exude nostalgia for the country she left behind: “I wanted to bring the serene, calm, minimal beauty of Korean culture to my painting,” she says. Her color palettes include the blues, greens, and purples typical of the South Korean countryside, and are inspired by the changing of the seasons. “I feel like my experience here [in the United States] is mixed in with [Korea] in each painting,” she says. These works are the focus of her current solo exhibition, Awakening Night, at Eleventh Hour Art in New York City.
Azure Mirage, 2023, oil on linen, 18 x 15 inches.
Before Kim begins a new painting, she jots down phrases to guide her approach, like “Foggy air, wet soil, early in the morning.” She then chooses her colors. “I think of my paintings as an imaginative landscape,” she says. “I am interested in the emotions you get from nature—the sound, the temperature, the non-physical [things].” She even mixes the pigments with lavender oil to create a watery, diffuse texture that recalls the wash of traditional Korean landscape paintings. (Plus, the lavender smell adds to the pieces’ sense of calm and serenity.) “I hope that viewers feel the slow pace,” when looking at her paintings, she says. “If my painting can slow their tempo down a little, that is something I really want to do.”
