Anna Zorina Gallery is pleased to announce the Yongjae Kim solo exhibition, Distant Light. Kim paints quiet urban scenes that hover between memory and observation. Streets, rooms, and cityscapes are suspended in time and rendered with cinematic precision. Muted color palettes and sparse settings create an atmosphere of silence and introspection, where the ordinary acquires an air of mystery.
Kim’s dreamlike scenes feel uncannily familiar, appearing as the places we pass countless times yet seldom stop to truly see. He draws the viewer into the overlooked moments, transforming quotidian surroundings into meditative spaces of wonder. Each painting invites a slowing of perception, revealing poetic beauty and meaning in the unnoticed corners of daily life.
Drawing from his experiences with transience and the persistent threat of vision loss, Kim’s work reflects a sharpened awareness of impermanence, where both body and home feel provisional. Moving through the city as an observer and wanderer, he translates fleeting moments into meditations on memory, belonging, and the passage of time. The urban environment, often defined by motion and noise, becomes unexpectedly static and rendered as a site of solitude and reflection.
Kim’s paintings exist in the tension between permanence and change, presence and absence, realism and imagination. While his compositions carry an undertone of uncertainty, they are also marked by restraint and calm. Each work suggests that stillness can hold unseen potential. In the subdued light, a hope persists that continuity can be found even in the fragile spaces of impermanence.
YONGJAE KIM (b. 1985, Seoul, South Korea) is currently based in New York City where he 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 attended Joshua Tree Highland Artists Residency Program in 2013. Kim received a Certificate of Appreciation from the Manhattan Borough President for his exhibition Flâneur in New York in 2019 and the NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in 2021. He is a 2023 recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant. His works have been exhibited at various venues throughout the United States, South Korea, Netherlands and Switzerland.