JOANNE KIM - WANDERLUST

In this series of works, Joanne Kim presents fourteen paintings depicting various scenes from her childhood. Kim was born in Seoul in 1995 and moved to California when she was ten. The colors and sensories she saw and felt at those real and yet dreamlike locations in Korea stayed with her years after leaving the country and helped her to not lose her sense of heritage. The locations in these works are particularly important as they embody emotions and act as anchors and sometimes protectors. Joanne Kim’s work is inspired by particular and visceral moments in her life. The migratory transition Kim experienced as a child has shaped her relationship with the environment and landscape she inhabits, which led her to employ haunting influences of place in her practice. Panoramic scenes with off-kilter perspectives are inspired by the topography of where Kim grew up. We usually encounter rows of traditional houses, narrow alleys, and the surrounding lights in her works.

Although she may forget the exact details of a face or place, she works hard to pull the emotions or memories of those experiences into a visual lexicon. Kim’s practice navigates the line between whimsical fantasy and deeper, more personal explorations of nostalgia. The specificity of perspective and temperature cue into emotional landscapes. The elements of longing and psychological restoration are conveyed by merging the past, the present, and the future in her practice. While the youthful figures are portrayed with a sense of playfulness and innocence, the melancholic landscapes also show stillness, suggesting how troubles and traumas characterize even the most blissful memories of childhood. There is a playful and curious quality to By the Moon and Stars, in which four young girls explore a pier with awe and wonder. Kim’s use of paint perfectly encapsulates the glassy, phosphorescent quality of water in the moonlight, giving the effect of an enchanting fairytale.

Raining, on the other hand, portrays a more somber scene in which a group of forlorn children wait for the rain to stop so they can go out and play. Scenes like this are drawn from recollections Kim has from her childhood, but also from historical literature and photographs of Korea. Tracing the history of the streets and towns she has visited or lived in enables the artist to gain a deeper sense of home and establish and maintain a personal connection with the country. Kim turns this profound understanding and feelings into paintings of these places, which then acquire a new layer of meaning and serve as media through which she can travel in time, relive and recover lost and forgotten pasts. Eventually, the paintings are woven with personal experiences, folklore and creativity, resulting in a fantastical world of memory and imagination.