Originality & Identity

Jinhee Kim’s paintings begin with the ordinary subject of “trivial everyday life,” yet within it, she explores the fundamental identity and sensibility of the self. In works such as The Heroine(2019) and Magic hour in the room II, III(2019), she reveals universal human emotions—feelings of absence, longing, and loss—through facial expressions and gestures. During her studies in Germany, she encountered the external gaze of the Western art world that identified her as an “Asian woman artist.” In response, Kim gradually began to remove the external markers of her figures, replacing them with depictions where nationality, gender, and race are erased.

The artist questions the illusion of “universality.” Erasing racial features or skin tone is not a form of abstraction, but rather an attempt to portray the “most personal self” free from the external gaze. At the same time, by repeatedly depicting light and simple daily acts—drinking water in the morning, waiting at a bus stop—she reveals that these mundane moments constitute the essential components of the self.

For Kim, “everyday life” is not merely a subject of representation but a stage for existential exploration. In works such as 〈In the Theatre〉(2023) and How to Make a Dog(2021), she employs theatrical composition and lighting to show that the seemingly trivial moments of daily life are in fact scenes where emotion and thought intersect. Through these, she captures the depth of being embedded within the ordinary, constructing a landscape of identity that moves fluidly between the individual and the collective, reality and imagination.

Style & Contents

Kim’s paintings are structured around the concepts of “stage” and “lighting.” She sets the pictorial plane as a theatrical space, within which figures and objects are meticulously arranged. As seen in Ikarus(2021), she borrows mythological narratives but transforms myths of human desire and downfall into quiet everyday scenes, handling the boundaries of time and space with fluidity. Here, the canvas becomes an in-between zone of reality and illusion, and the figures act as performers on stage, exchanging gazes with the viewer.

The orchestration of color and light forms the core of her painterly language. In the two-person exhibition 《Curtain Call》(ThisWeekendRoom, 2022) and the solo exhibition 《Our Dawns Are Not What They Seem》(ThisWeekendRoom, 2023), she conveys feelings of death, loss, and absence through dramatic contrasts of color and light. Yet, this illumination is never extreme; rather, it dwells in the liminal time of “dawn,” as the artist describes—a state that is neither full darkness nor complete brightness. In Face of Dawn 1(2023) and Inside of the Orgel(2023), light appears ambiguous and transient, infusing each scene with an unstable, delicate tension.

Her figures evoke the compositional balance and formal sensibility of classical painting, yet they exist in a state of indeterminacy rather than expressing concrete emotions or narratives. In her recent works, including I Collected Leaves(2025) and Leftover(2024), the relationship between humans and objects becomes faint and uncertain. Ordinary things such as cookies, chocolates, and drawers appear without clear symbolism, creating a surface that sustains tension between meaning and meaninglessness, emotion and sensation.

Topography & Continuity

Jinhee Kim is recognized as an artist who has built a new visual language in contemporary Korean painting that explores “everyday life and identity.” She does not translate personal experience into autobiographical narrative but instead refines a visual language situated between universality and ambiguity. Her figures—anyone and no one—embody both lightness and depth, clarity and uncertainty.

This approach became further internalized in her recent works presented in the group exhibition 《Young Korean Artists 2025: Here and Now》(MMCA, 2025). Whereas earlier works depicted figures under the public gaze in communal spaces, her recent paintings focus on personal spaces such as homes, balconies, and desks. Yet even these interiors are not entirely private—they retain both anonymity and universality. Kim conceives of private space as an open field of perception that connects the individual with the world.

Currently working between Seoul and Berlin, Kim continues to expand the theme of the “universal individual” across differing cultural contexts. Her paintings transcend the surface of social identity to visualize the subtle tremors of human existence—the uncertain, unformed layers of feeling that constitute lived experience. In the future, her work is likely to develop further upon this “aesthetics of ambiguity,” creating ever more intricate portraits of “here and now” within the diverse visual languages of the global art scene.