ARTBOX.PROJECT New York 1.0 HEE SOOK KIM

Hee Sook Kim has long demonstrated an affinity for hybrid identities; as a woman who grew up in Korea and who has taught for more than a decade at Haverford College in the suburbs of Philadelphia, she has internalized experience from two very different places and cultures. Kim has evolved a style that greets the ephemeral as well as the insights she gained as an artist working for more than a decade in New York. Her work, with its decorative patterns and exquisite designs, invites her audience to view the traces of her long and varied journey as a Korean, an emigrant, and a woman. Using her sensibility with unusual skill, Kim attaches care and energy to her lyric compositions, conversational echoes that build a dialogue between cultures and their differing attitudes toward art.

Kim places craft at the center of her art, a masterful combination of skill, thought, and emotion. Kim experiments in an eclectic and international field of source materials. Kim’s association with abstraction balances her aesthetic; her imagery engages in a supportive system of reference affecting both new and historical creativities. Metaphor lies at the root of innovation; the rhetorical play between image and eye draws connections powerfully new to audience. Kim offers the merger of styles that culminates in a synthesis lyrical in nature. We can call her manner of working a visual poetry that both acknowledges cultural bias and works to transcend that bias within her artistic explorations.
Jonathan Goodman (NY based critic)