Artist Statement

Tae Yeun Kim is a painter and sculptor from Seoul, South Korea. His artistic practice is driven by a quest to reveal the action of movements and express them through visual imagery. Rather than reproducing a specific object or event in his paintings, he creates creatures that become a new medium to show the process. With an encounter to anything new and unfamiliar, we tend to feel bizarre and abnormal, but soon become accustomed to the new. Tae Yeun Kim’s works and new creatures take on a similar effect. The wriggling movement created by living organisms are expressed by repetitive small planes in his works, and the assemblage of those planes resemble the surface of a planarian, the skin of an earthworm, or an insect’s joints. The planes are infinitely united and divided, and the creatures are free formations that have no limitations in transformation. It is impossible to say what these creatures actually are except to state that they merely exist, just as how some things cannot be defined in our world. As he believes the simultaneity of life and death coexist in our body and in our society, Kim strives to show and prove this through his works.