Born 1985, Seoul, South Korea
Lives and works in New York City
Yongjae Kim paints everyday places while adopting the perspective of someone preparing to depart. Viewed through this lens, ordinary landscapes are recontextualized, appearing as vivid but distant memories. Based on actual locations, the artist composes each scene through a subjective process, using a realistic representational style filtered through his imagination.
The environments Kim depicts often reflect dissatisfaction, incompleteness, and discomfort, shaped by his experiences including unstable living conditions as a foreigner, financial instability, exposure to life-threatening events, and the ongoing risk of vision loss due to a retinal disorder. These circumstances have informed his awareness of impermanence and the provisional nature of existence.
This recognition has led the artist to perceive himself as a traveler within his own life, observing not only the temporary character of his surroundings but also the transience of the traveler.
Kim's work engages with the tensions between permanence and transience, absence and presence, and reality and imagination. Rather than emphasizing despair, the paintings reflect a subdued form of hope and a desire for permanence within the instability of experience. Through this process, familiar landscapes are transformed into spaces that suggest an unattainable but persistent longing for stability within impermanence.
Yongjae Kim is a member artist of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. Kim earned his B.F.A. from Seoul National University in 2011 and his M.F.A. from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2014. He received the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant in 2023, the NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in 2021 and a Certificate of Appreciation from the Manhattan Borough President for his exhibition Flâneur in New York in 2019. He attended Joshua Tree Highland Artists Residency Program in 2013. His works have been exhibited at various venues throughout the United States, South Korea, Netherlands and Switzerland.