Bumin Kim: Voice of Color

About

Bumin Kim’s intricate manipulation of materials highlights her ability to challenge the traditional model of what a painting should be. Brushstrokes become thread, and the flat surface is liberated to breathe into three-dimensional space. The artist acknowledges the transformative power of materiality at play, repurposing the context of thread to emphasize the energy, delicacy, and grace of painting.

Bumin Kim employs simple and repetitive compositions, revealing a variety of distinctions in hue, depth, luminosity, and texture - this effect echoes pure tranquility and beauty. Although Kim’s work is much about line, structure, color, and light, these formal characteristics do not describe the works powerful emotional resonance. In this recent body of work, Kim has “been exploring how the colors talk, what stories are behind them, and the inner response they evoke” from the viewer. Moreover, Kim uses the thread as a symbol of connecting places, ideas, and people, that are otherwise not present in her current physical surroundings, like her family in South Korea. 

Kim’s abstracted landscapes voice her “current interests in music and poems,” and expand upon the associations between place, time, and memory. The flat arid plains, sunny skies and the starry nights of Texas inspire her work, blending in a distant harmony with the Korean landscape of her youth. Furthemore, the laborious works mystify and play with the viewer’s perception through the utilization of the multicolored threads and elemental shapes. The viewer is prompted to walk around her paintings to discover that the piece transforms as the threads appear to shift in somewhat of a moiré effect, an optical illusion that conveys kineticism and interactivity, placing Kim in the aesthetic realm of Bridget Riley and the Op art movement.