So Yeon Kim – Artist Portfolio Magazine

Artist Portfolio Magazine – 2017 Q4 Art Competition

So Yeon Kim – New York, NY
Instagram

So Yeon Kim (1995, Seoul, South Korea) is an New York based artist and photographer who works in a variety of media. So Yeon has had two solo exhibitions in Japan (G2 Gallery Tokyo, Japan 2011) and Shanghai (Korean Cultural Center Shanghai, China 2014). Her works are presented with the aim not to provide an idealistic view but to identify where energy and spontaneity are important. The energy of a place and its emotional and spiritual vibrations are always important. Combining unrelated aspects lead to surprising analogies. So Yeon’s works are a drawn reflection upon the art of art itself: thoroughly self-referential, yet no less aesthetically pleasing, and therefore deeply inscribed in the history of modernism. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, she absorbs the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice. This personal follow-up and revival of a past tradition is important as an act of meditation.

Multilayered images arise in which the fragility and instability of our seemingly certain reality is questioned. By exploring the concept of energy and spontaneity in a nostalgic way, she finds that movement reveals an inherent awkwardness, a disposition that echoes our own vulnerabilities. The works doesn’t reference recognizable form. The results are deconstructed to the extent that meaning is shifted and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted.

By applying abstraction, she tries to grasp language. Transformed into art, language becomes an ornament. At that moment, lots of ambiguities and indistinctnesses, which are inherent to the phenomenon, come to the surface. So Yeon Kim currently lives and works in New York .