The Artist's reception on October 10th from 7:30-9:30 pm will feature fabulous New Orleans Style jazz by Jesse Selengut and the Tin Pan Blues Band.
Cheol Yu Kim’s exhibition of new work at Slate Gallery marks his first New York solo show in five years after his stunning debut at CUE Art Founda... Read more
The Artist’s reception on October 10th from 7:30-9:30 pm will feature fabulous New Orleans Style jazz by Jesse Selengut and the Tin Pan Blues Band.
Cheol Yu Kim’s exhibition of new work at Slate Gallery marks his first New York solo show in five years after his stunning debut at CUE Art Foundation in 2003. Slate Gallery will introduce a new series of nine large-scale ink and watercolor drawings by this rising Asian artist.
Although limited to a palette of gray, pale red or a light atmospheric blue, Kim, a skilled draughtsman and watercolorist, creates fantastic spacescapes rendered with delicate lines and shadowy washes. Titled Delta Quadrants, a reference to areas of unmapped space from the television classic Star Trek, Kim’s images float weightlessly and serenely across the picture plane. As the artist continues to draw his imagery from childhood memories of nature (seeds, insects, birds, shells) and of the military presence (soldiers, planes, missiles, parachutes) in the small Korean village near the DMZ where he grew up, Kim’s impulse in his new work is to give free rein to his imagination. He states, my memories and experiences are intermingled with my imagination and dreams. It is often unclear what is real and what is not. I find it hard to draw a line between the real and the imaginary, and that line is where I start. My work arises from the boundaries of what is familiar and what is not. It helps me deal with life better, one step at a time.
Indeed Kim’s recent work has morphed into new territory, the imagery of science fiction (galaxies, battlefields, alien life forms). Previously, Kim layered the entire picture plane with images of futuristic machinery floating towards and away from the viewer and rising in vertical formations with mechanical regularity, but now the artist sometimes leaves large areas of the paper blank. There is still a mechanistic quality in the circular gear-like shapes that appear to slowly rotate clockwise and counterclockwise, but spirals and other strange biomorphic forms suggesting plant and sea life predominate. Kim’s mutations seem to unfurl, spurt, spew and propel themselves horizontally across the picture plane. An underwater world is suggested until the viewer notices cartoonish armies of tiny aliens and other details that place Kim’s fantasies in outer space.
Cheol Yu Kim was born in a tiny rural village of 16 houses surrounded by mountains and the ocean in Korea near the DMZ. Always fascinated by flight, he found inspiration in anything airborne. He graduated with BFA and MFA degrees in sculpture from Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Korea in 1995 and Brooklyn College, City University of New York in 2002. Kim’s drawings can be understood as a pre-sculptural stage evident in how he rearranges images, shadows and light according to Nikki S. Lee, who curated his first solo show at CUE Art Foundation, NY in 2003. He received a favorable review in Art in America and he was a winner of the 2000 Charles Schwab Award.
