Soonnam Kim

Korean Contemporary Art by Soonnam Kim - New Symphony No. 17: Empty Fullness 8

2021

Soonnam Kim is a Korean artist born in 1969 who lives and works in Seoul, South Korea. Kim studied painting at Changwon National University in Korea (BFA) and moved to US to continue her study art in 1995. Kim earned her master's degree (MFA) in fine art majoring in painting and drawing from New Jersey City University in New Jersey in 1998. She taught various art classes at the Fine Art Department of the School of Fine and Performing Arts of Kean University in New Jersey from 2004 to 2013 as an adjunct professor. After 20 years life in US, she moved to Germany in 2014, and lived and worked as an artist in Wuppertal, Germany until the spring of 2019. She visited many art museums and galleries, met artists, and traveled many cities and countries of Europe and also in the India Dharamsala where she stayed one month and attended Dalai Lama’s teaching. She moved back to Korea in 2019 and is currently living and working as a fulltime artist in Seoul. Kim was selected as one of five Asian women artists in New Jersey by Dr. Midori Yoshimoto, and the exhibition was reviewed by the New York Times on April 03, 2005. She was also selected as an artist of the 2nd Part (1989 – 2001) of the Archive for Korean-American living artists. Only 46 artists were selected from over 200 applicants. The exhibition was held at Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY and Korean Cultural Service of New York in 2014. Kim had 16 solo exhibitions and many group invitation exhibitions and art fairs in Korea, United States, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Kim’s art works have transformed from semi geometric lyrical abstract to more curvilinear abstract composition during last 30 years. Her most recent artworks are the New Symphony Series in which she focuses only on the harmony of lines, colors, and dots. She makes constant actions of adding lines and dots onto canvas with oil paint by using a palette knife. Making painting is for her making musical symphony-like composition onto two dimensional pictorial plane, and at the same time it is her own meditation. She wants to be liberated from all her lifelong attachments of mind which cause anguish and suffering by simply repeating the actions of paint stroke, and eventually to create harmonious visual status like paradise in her mind. She tries to create classical beauty in her painting that is like classical music in which all beings can rest in the peaceful energy vibration and wave.