Minyoung Kim explores feelings of both anxiety and regret in dreamlike compositions, channeling personal experiences into her painting practice. Kim’s paintings appear both eerie and lighthearted, featuring recurring motifs of moons, flowers, knives, and anthropomorphic characters.
Minyoung Kim (b. 1989) is a Korean artist based in London, UK, who works with different media, which includes drawing, painting, collage, video, and ceramics. Kim graduated from Sungshin Women's University with a bachelor's degree in painting in 2012 and a master's degree in printmaking in 2014. She also earned a second master's degree in painting at the Slade School of Fine Arts in 2021 after graduating from there. She has had numerous solo shows and group exhibitions in different corners of the world.
Minyoung Kim explores feelings of both anxiety and regret in dreamlike compositions, channeling personal experiences into her painting practice. Kim’s paintings appear both eerie and lighthearted, featuring recurring motifs of moons, flowers, knives, and anthropomorphic characters. Kim transforms scenes from everyday life into sinister moments by applying cartoon-like expressions to inanimate objects. There are elements of mystery in Kim’s narratives, conveyed through shadows, muted colors, and an almost blurred finish. Her unsettling paintings echo her own personal cynicism, calling attention to the complexities of modern society. By using unstretched raw canvas, she portrays, in a soft manner, ironic scenes that combine what she refers to as strange but cute elements. It’s in this light and serious ambivalence that she explores and reveals her inner self.
Absurd humor and dangerous dreams in Minyoung Kim’s paradoxical imaginary realities Korean artist Minyoung Kim creates painted narratives that traverse the boundary between the playful humor of everyday scenarios and a surreality that threatens to tip her subjects into perilous dream worlds. These are visions populated by intelligent and curious black cats, naked female explorers, sentient food items, snakes, fish, and fauna, set in moonlit landscapes and vast oceans or conversely in domestic spaces and on tablecloths. The absurd humor of Minyoung’s images is underpinned by her blending of fine, realistic detailswith a naive, illustrative style. This meeting of realism and unreal visual formations echoes the simultaneously vivid and off-kilter, half-remembered nature of dreams, which, among poetry and animated films, hold particular importance for the artist when it comes to sourcing inspiration. In viewing Minyoung’s paintings, we are invited to participate in this dream world, yet the elementsthat go intoits presentation continually hold us at a distance.