Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Kim has held solo exhibitions including 《Dear morning》 (Space Willing N Dealing, Seoul, 2025), 《Please save my earth》 (Space Willing N Dealing, Seoul, 2023), 《Furry Ways》 (Mihakgwan, Seoul, 2022), and 《Eat and Drink: I love myself, but I hate myself》 (Instant Roof, Seoul, 2021), among others.

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Kim has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Mothering Fluid》 (Amado Art Space, Seoul, 2026), 《Unknown workout ground》 (Factory2, Seoul, 2025), 《Milky Way》 (Noon Contemporary, Seoul, 2024), 《We are gradually getting closer》 (Zaha Museum, Seoul, 2024), 《New Life》 (Space Willing N Dealing, Seoul, 2022), and 《Ha-ha-ha haus》 (Suwon Museum of Art, Suwon, 2021).

Collections (Selected)

Kim’s works are included in the collection of institutions such as the Gyeonggi Children's Museum.

Originality & Identity

Heoang Kim’s work has developed around anxiety toward a future that may never arrive, the fatigue and incidents repeatedly encountered in reality, and the small force that nevertheless allows one to keep living. In her first solo exhibition 《BAD ENDING ~An Evening When Something Ominous Could Happen~》(Archive Bomm, 2015), the artist unfolded, through a drawing-based narrative, the anxiety that the world might come to an end in the near future as she looked upon a chaotic protest scene.

The figures from this period attempt to escape monotonous everyday life or try making new choices, but they are ultimately placed within a structure that returns them to the starting point. Even with the premonition that “nothing will work out in the end,” the attitude of the figures who weave nets and sharpen knives anticipates Kim’s distinctive sense of survival, at once pessimistic and persistent, which recurs throughout her later work.
 
Around the time of her 2020 solo exhibition 《mama do》(Keep in Touch, 2020), the artist’s gaze shifted toward the realities of pregnancy, childbirth, childcare, and caregiving labor. However, Kim does not idealize “becoming a mother” as a warm or sublime image. In works such as The Seething Head Boiled Over and Flew Off with a Bang(2019), Daily Routine(2019), A Walk in Midsummer(2018), and I Can’t Sleep(2019), the caregiver is exhausted, melting down, and trapped in repetitive labor, yet the scenes do not close off as mere tragedy.

Kim treats the messiness of childcare, changes in the body, and emotional depletion like black comedy, revealing the actual sensations of “doing mother” outside the image of motherhood demanded by society. Here, laughter is not a decoration that covers pain, but closer to a minimal form for enduring a collapsing everyday life.
 
After 《Furry Ways》(Mihakgwan, 2022), Kim’s work begins from personal everyday life, yet expands into broader time and space through the worldviews of games and comics. This exhibition, which began with the death of her companion dog, overlaps an imagined world after death, memories of childhood games, and nostalgia for a place one cannot reach. Map of Beyond(2022) evokes both the map inside a game and the sense of loss in reality through an imagination of “a world one can access but cannot arrive at.”

Here, the player figures in the form of children do not defeat enemies or conquer something, but observe, walk, and learn the order of the world. This is not a way of solving life like a quest, but is closer to a way of growing by accumulating sensations within an uncertain world.
 
By the time of 《Please Save My Earth》(Space Willing N Dealing) in 2023 and 《Dear morning》(Space Willing N Dealing) in 2025, the artist’s concerns move beyond the experience of motherhood and childrearing toward the Anthropocene, the climate crisis, and an imagination of a post-human world.

Works such as Flowers(2023), Dear Evening(2023), The Summit(2023), The Octopus Girl(2023), and Deep Dreams We Shared(2023) create scenes where adult anxiety and the possibilities of the next generation intersect.

As Kim states in a recent artist’s note, she imagines a future in which humans can no longer survive solely in the existing human form, and paints new life forms that mingle with beings such as mountains, octopuses, birds, insects, and rocks. In her work, transformation is not simply fantasy, but a practice for moving beyond anthropocentrism and an attempt to reimagine the world in which the next generation will live.

Style & Contents

The eighty early drawings Kim presented in 《BAD ENDING ~An Evening When Something Ominous Could Happen~》 gather street scenes, people, and incidents like fragments and weave them into a single ominous story. Rather than realistically reproducing reality, the image compresses the fatigue of everyday life and anxiety toward the world into comic-like scenes.

The figures have simple expressions and symbolized gestures, while the events operate both as records of reality and as fables created by the artist. This drawing-based sensibility continues in her later paintings and becomes an important method through which Kim transforms complex emotions into clear and immediate images.
 
The paintings and drawings later presented in 《mama do》 actively use bright color fields, cartoon-like characters, compositions reminiscent of game screens, exaggerated expressions, and bodily deformation. Works such as Where is My Fucking Taxi(2018), Haeeun with Green Vomit(2019), 500 Cigarettes Smoked in the Mind(2019), Picking One’s Nose Confidently(2019), and Dad’s Art Class(2019) deal with concrete scenes of childcare and everyday life, yet they do not explain them in an overly heavy or didactic way.

Figures melt down, fly away, or become trapped inside a game console, while pills and books float like items. Repetitive caregiving labor is expressed like an endlessly repeated stage in an old video game, and the caregiver’s body appears not as a fixed identity but as a state that transforms like liquid.
 
In 《Furry Ways》, Kim’s images are composed by combining game maps, routes of exploration, and animals and landscapes encountered during walks. The memory of the 1997 game 〈How to Become a Wizard〉 becomes an important background for this exhibition. In the game, the child gathers herbs according to the seasons, learns magic, and grows through failure and frustration.

Kim transfers this structure into the world of painting, creating scenes in which small players hold telescopes and look into the distance, use magnifying glasses like magic wands to search, or observe a campfire. As in the painting The Explorer(2022), the figures who try to come to know the world are cute and small, but the world they face is not simply a space of play; it is a place through which one must continue walking even after loss.
 
In the works after 《Please Save My Earth》, changes also appear in her materials and the sensibility of the screen. Moving away from the heavy texture of thick oil paint in earlier works toward fast and bold brushwork using acrylic, strong colors, and a sense of density built through thin layers, her images gain a sense of speed and fantasy.

The ‘The Giant’ series, The Explorer(2025), and the insect and rock characters in 《Dear morning》 appear in fairy-tale-like and playful forms, but within them lie questions about coexistence between humans and nonhumans, shifts in ways of survival, and bodily transformation.

In particular, in 《Dear morning》, insects that were once objects of aversion are transformed into anthropomorphic characters, while vague anxiety is translated into the journey of rock characters passing through game levels one by one. Rather than directly depicting disaster and anxiety within painting, Kim converts them into images of exploration, transformation, training, and walking.

Topography & Continuity

Heoang Kim connects experiences from private life directly to social issues, yet she does not push them into explanatory slogans or heavy criticism. Themes such as pregnancy and childbirth, childcare, housework, the death of a companion animal, a child’s growth, the climate crisis, and the Anthropocene could easily be organized into familiar discourses, but Kim translates them again through the languages of games, comics, sitcoms, fairy tales, and fantasy.

For this reason, her paintings may appear cute and cheerful, yet within them lie dense questions about bodily depletion, the pressure of social roles, differences in temporal perception between generations, and the possibility of survival after the human. The simultaneous operation of laughter and anxiety, cuteness and strangeness, play and survival within a single image is what gives Kim’s work its distinctiveness.
 
In contemporary art, works dealing with motherhood or care often unfold around bodily pain, institutional critique, and the recovery of women’s narratives. Kim’s work also shares points of contact with this tendency, but her approach is somewhat different. She does not make motherhood sublime or summarize care only as an ethical value.

Instead, she places the melting body in A Walk in Midsummer, the endlessly repeated low-level game in Daily Routine, and the uncomfortable reality encountered by the female body within an institutional space in At Ob/Gyn(2021) onto a surface of humor and fantasy. Because of this, her work does not remain in the confession of female experience, but expands toward the question that when the body changes, the way one senses the world also changes.
 
Another important characteristic is that Kim does not consume the game and comic sensibility of 1990s Korea and Japan merely as retro imagery. For her, games are not only a source of visual style, but also a structure for understanding the world. Elements such as levels, quests, items, events, players, maps, and respawns become devices for reconsidering loss and failure in reality.

In 《Furry Ways》, the game becomes a way of imagining the place where her deceased companion dog may have arrived, while in 《Dear morning》 it becomes a form of training for passing through an anxious future. In this way, Kim does not use game-based imagination to escape reality, but creates a sensory model through which reality may be lived again.
 
Heoang Kim has gradually expanded her artistic concerns through various exhibitions in Korea. In particular, the artist has built points of contact with exhibitions dealing with motherhood, care, coexistence, and the relationship between humans and nonhumans. Based on sensations drawn from personal life, Kim is expected to continue pushing forward the post-human world through small and concrete gestures, characters, living beings, walks, and scenes of transformation.