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June Issue 2006
Yong Kim Fine Art Opens in Charleston, SC
Yong Kim Fine Art
in Charleston, SC, is presenting its Grand Opening exhibit featuring
large acrylic paintings by Yong Kim, on view through June 30,
2006.
A self-taught artist with a Master's degree
in philosophy from University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Kim was
born in South Korea and came to the States at age thirteen. For
a long time he was preparing for an intellectual life, life as
a professor and a philosopher. But disillusioned by the academic
world and realizing it was not what he wanted to do for the rest
of his life, he quit at the last step, the Ph.D. dissertation.
After a few years of struggling to find meaningful work, he rediscovered
his childhood love in drawing and painting.
Kim has been painting for only three years (not counting childhood),
but passionately with almost a single-minded devotion. With a
very successful first solo exhibit last year that resulted in
nine paintings sold, things were going well. Then came difficult
choices. When the gallery owner refused to share information about
the clients who bought his paintings, he decided never to exhibit
at that gallery again. Unfortunately, the market for abstract
art in Charleston is small at best with very few galleries who
would even consider showing them. And for one reason or another,
he could not find a gallery to exhibit despite the success last
year. So when he came across a good living/working studio space
with excellent location and plenty of display area, he decided
to take matters into his own hands and open his own studio/gallery
to show his work.
"Doing things yourself or your own way has advantages," he says. "You have control over how you want to present things. For example, I can do away with the silly titles for exhibits. Galleries always want them, but they serve no purpose for the kind of work I do. I don't paint with themes in mind. No, not even subconsciously. (Yes, I'm a Jungian expert, why do you ask?) I don't do bunch of fish paintings. Or flowers. Or some contrived series of paintings with superficial similarities. I'm not bad-mouthing titles per se, but I'm sure you've been to exhibits where you thought to yourself, 'gee I bet they had a tough time coming up with a title for this show!' I think I had that very thought myself at my own exhibit last year! And the whole practice is silly, often unnecessary, and sometimes even nonsensical. Only more so with my shows because often the only connection between one painting and the next is the knowledge I've gained from the previous one and possibly exploiting that knowledge in a new way to take another step in a promising, interesting direction".
"This experimental attitude pervades my whole approach to painting and it's no wonder that people often comment how eclectic my paintings are," adds Kim. "When Tristan, the upscale downtown restaurant by the French Quarter Inn, bought seven of my paintings to decorate their walls in their reopening last year (obviously the gallery owner couldn't keep this client a secret from me), one early reviewer commented that they had added color and movement to the restaurant by incorporating paintings from several fresh local talents, not realizing they were all from the same person! That mistake is telling of my approach to painting. While many artists struggle to find their own voice or style, you might say that I struggle to find one voice or style after another, constantly moving on, but occasionally revisiting."
"Despite all that, however, there is something useful or substantive that I can say about this exhibit. While I continue to experiment with color, I'm going through a stage where I use certain colors together more and more frequently, and the experiment has moved on to form more than color. In the past I've experimented with line work a lot, but recently I've moved on to thicker brush strokes (thicker lines or blocks). And I'm experimenting with movement, fast brush strokes and slow brush strokes having very different effects. Sometimes painting feels like dancing, requiring certain rhythms and certain type of movements."
For further information check our SC Commercial
Gallery listings, call the gallery at 843/853-2669 or e-mail at
(yongkim7777@hotmail.com).
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