Sunny Kim (b. 1969) reconstructs images that evoke human loss and unstable memories in the form of painting, creating a paused ‘fictional space’ where memories or imaginations repeatedly emerge and disappear.
 
Drawing from her brief childhood memories in Korea, she juxtaposes images of 'girls in uniforms' with traditional embroidery or other conventional images. Through conscious appropriation and exclusion, she attempts to realize an unattainable 'perfect image.'

Having immigrated to the U.S. at the age of 14, Kim views school uniforms as a symbol of her image of Korea. To her, school uniforms evoke ideas of familiarity or unfamiliarity, ideals and oppression, ideology and romanticism, the individual and the collective, and overlapping or contradictory memories. 
 
While these reflections extend from the personal to the societal, Kim has repeatedly portrayed girls in school uniforms on canvas, leaving room for various interpretations of the subject.

In 2001, Sunny Kim made her debut in the Korean art scene with her first solo exhibition, “Girls in Uniform,” at Gallery Sagan in Seoul. The paintings depicted girls in school uniforms, consistent with the exhibition's title.
 
Her Girls in Uniform series occupies a space between photography and painting, resembling images printed from damaged black-and-white film. While the figures are rendered solidly, details like facial features and fingers are blurred, and the background is completely empty. This void reflects gaps in her memories of Korea, while the indistinct depiction echoes the haziness of her childhood recollections.

Sunny Kim has also presented paintings that juxtapose images of girls in school uniforms with 18th-century traditional Korean embroidery, such as Sipjangsaeng (Ten Symbols of Longevity). She expresses a symbolic parallel between the two images.
 
Just as she associated the school uniform with feelings of oppression, strictness, and uniformity, she felt a similar context in traditional embroidery. Kim saw rigidity in the femininity, delicacy, and almost perfect intricacy of traditional embroidery.
 
Based on this idea, Sunny Kim reinterpreted and patternized traditional embroidery motifs like the Ten Symbols of Longevity (crane, deer, turtle, etc.) and nature (clouds, sun, waves, landscape, etc.) from a contemporary perspective. By transforming embroidery techniques into painting, her refined imagery attempts to break free from the historical and institutional meanings that these motifs originally carried. The juxtaposition and blending of the schoolgirls and embroidered images thus alter and liberate the fundamental qualities inherent in each.

Later, the artist began to paint landscapes devoid of figures. These landscapes, representing a world from which the girls had disappeared, are familiar yet unknowable, like scenes from a dream, blurred as if shrouded in mist. According to the artist, these are "landscapes one might encounter when lost."
 
Meanwhile, her 2013 work Line depicts the landscape of the Tumen River, which she visited in person. This painting portrays a spot along the river that is neither in China nor North Korea, focusing on an ambiguous border. The landscape, filled with the multitude of emotions the artist experienced while standing on this uncertain boundary, is rendered in a blurred and fast-paced manner, evoking a sense of unease.

Sunny Kim's landscapes reflect her emotional state, making them paintings of the mind that touch upon the viewer's psychology and emotions. In this sense, her landscapes exist somewhere between traditional landscape painting and abstraction or conceptual art, resisting easy categorization.
 
Unexpected elements often appear in her landscapes, such as the black field of color partially obscuring the upper portion of Encounter (2017), with paint drips left intentionally visible. These expressive gestures disrupt the viewer's immersion in the represented landscape.

In 2014, Sunny Kim presented the performance work Landscape, which brought landscapes onto the stage. In this performance, video footage of landscapes was projected onto the stage, while girls in school uniforms, previously seen in her paintings, walked around trees and ponds, re-enacting poses from the paintings or reciting Korean traditional poetry (Kim Satgot, 1807–1864).
 
In Kim’s performance, multiple layers of landscapes coexist: the landscape on the screen, the landscapes created by the actors as they read poetry describing the scenery, and the landscape composed of all the elements on stage, including the video and the actors. Landscape was an experiment that transferred the theatricality found in her paintings into real space, offering a new way to explore the essence of painting.
 
According to the artist, the passage of time in Landscape represents a journey of self-discovery for the girls and serves as a metaphor for the human condition, where people, like the girls, must navigate through an unknown world.

In 2017, Sunny Kim participated in the “Korea Artist Prize” exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, as a finalist, presenting work under the theme "Leap in the Dark." She created a living space where paintings, videos, and objects interacted across three rooms, generating unfamiliar images and memories.
 
Her installation Landscape, presented at this time, brought together many of the elements she had developed throughout her career. It emerged from her contemplation of painting and the question of what an image truly is. The performance Landscape was projected onto her paintings, with the girls from the paintings becoming light and moving once again within the artwork. In other words, the performance re-enacted the paintings, and in this space, the performance's images were re-enacted as paintings once more.

For Sunny Kim, who had no choice but to create non-existent memories, this work stemmed from her desire to transform the space within her paintings into a tangible, real space. The objects used in the performance—trees, stones, mirrors, and pillars—were arranged alongside the performance video, leading her to explore whether the entire space could exist as a single image. Through this process, she questioned whether these images, directly tied to her imperfect emotions, could intertwine and create their own reality.
 
By once again bringing the psychological realm of lost things, which she had long sought to express, into a physical space, Kim created a room imbued with a sense of loss and anxiety. This room, infused with such emotions, ultimately exists as a living image.

In this way, Sunny Kim captures blurred memories and imagined images both on canvas and beyond, exploring themes of painting, image-making, loss, and anxiety. Her works seep into the deep emotional layers of the viewer, passing through their eyes and reaching into their hearts. Kim’s art, which reflects the journey of searching for a complete sense of self, resonates with all of us living through our own struggles. It may be for this reason that her works come back to us as a portrait of ourselves today.

"At some point, I started thinking about creating a perfect image. For me, there were always two countries—America and Korea—so I always felt divided in some way, and I wanted to break free from that duality and create a perfect, ideal image."

Sunny Kim received her BFA from The Cooper Union, N.Y. and her MFA from Hunter College, N.Y. Kim has held solo exhibitions at various venues, including Nathalie Karg Gallery (New York, 2021), A-Lounge (Seoul, 2020), Incheon Art Platform Theater (Incheon, 2014), Space bm (Seoul, 2013), Gallery Hyundai 16 bungee (Seoul, 2010), and Ilmin Museum of Art (Seoul, 2006).
 
Additionally, she has participated in numerous group exhibitions at prominent institutions, such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul, 2021), Art Center White Block (Paju, 2019), A.P.T (London, 2018), the MMCA’s "Korea Artist Prize" (Seoul, 2017), Culture Station Seoul 284 (Seoul, 2012), and Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, 2007). She currently resides and works between Seoul and New York.

References

• 올해의 작가상, 써니킴 (Korea Artist Prize, Sunny Kim)
• 써니킴, Sunny Kim (Artist Website)
• 리얼디엠지프로젝트, 써니킴 (REAL DMZ PROJECT, Sunny Kim)
• 아트인사이트, [Opinion] 올해의 작가상 - 써니킴 [시각예술], 2017.11.08
• 월간미술, 써니 킴 (Monthly Art, Sunny Kim)