Byron Kim: The Big and Small Have Something to Do with Love

In his ongoing Sunday Paintings, Byron Kim returns each week to a simple structure: a painted sky paired with a handwritten text. Begun in 2001, the series moves between abstraction and record keeping, between something vast and something very close to daily life. What he describes as something small set against something much larger. [Read on]

In conversation with ArtRabbit’s Morgan Everhart at James Cohan Gallery, Kim reflects on the 2024 paintings now on view. The conversation moves through care, language, perception, and the surprising freedom of making work he does not feel the need to hold onto.

Perception and the Limits of Imagination

Early in the conversation, Kim describes something that reframes how his work is made. He recently discovered that he has aphantasia, an inability to form mental images. “I don’t see anything,” he explains. “If I close my eyes and imagine an apple, there’s nothing there. I can describe it to myself, but I’m not looking at anything.”

For a painter, the admission feels almost contradictory. But for Kim, it clarifies something fundamental. “I don’t have that kind of talent people associate with drawing,” he says. “I can’t really draw something from my imagination. If I want to make something, I have to look at it. I think I’m extra good now at observing things that I’m looking at. I just have no ability to observe something that I’m not looking at.”

This reliance on observation rather than internal imagery shifts the role of painting. It is not an act of projection, but of attention. When he describes making earlier works, studying the color of taxicabs and the shadow beneath them, it becomes clear that looking is not passive for him. It is a form of construction. “I had to go out on the street and look,” he says. “That was the only way to figure it out.”

Even memory follows this pattern. “When I need to remember something, I describe it to myself really well,” he explains. “It’s not visual.” The result is a practice grounded less in imagination and more in language, observation, and repetition.

Byron Kim, Sunday Painting (1-14-24), 2024, Acrylic and pencil on panel, 14 x 14 in at James Cohan Gallery, New York. © Byron Kim 2024. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by GC Photography.

The Present Tense of the Sunday Paintings

That structure carries directly into the Sunday Paintings. Each work compresses a week into a few lines, but Kim resists the idea that they form a narrative. “I don’t think of it as a story,” he says. “There’s no consciousness of that at all. I’m just thinking, what’s going on right now?”

The entries are not retrospectives. They are anchored in the present moment, often written on Sunday, but just as often delayed until Monday or Tuesday. What matters is not accuracy, but proximity. “If you read them carefully, I’m usually just talking about what’s happening right now,” he says. “Someone’s coming over for dinner. Something just happened. It’s not about Tuesday at 3pm. It’s just what’s in my mind.”

This distinction is subtle but important. The paintings do not attempt to document a week. They register what remains of it. What rises to the surface is not necessarily what happened, but what persists.

“I don’t even have much of a consciousness of what happened the whole week,” he admits. “Unless it’s something huge, it’s gone.” What replaces it is something closer to atmosphere, a mental residue rather than a record.

Caregiving and Emotional Restraint

In the 2024 works, caregiving appears frequently. References to his parents, to illness, to daily logistics, move through the texts without emphasis. The tone remains steady, even when the subject carries weight.

Kim acknowledges the distance. “When I write things down, I think I’m afraid to get too emotional,” he says. “It’s not conscious, but I think that’s part of it.” He describes a hesitation to revisit the works after they are installed. “I haven’t read them all the way through,” he admits. “I’m kind of worried that I will. I’m afraid to do it.”

The restraint is not indifference. It is a form of containment. “I haven’t been that sad about my dad’s death,” he says, then pauses. “But people tell me they cry reading them. So I’m a little reluctant to read them myself.”

What emerges is a structure where emotion is displaced rather than expressed directly. The text remains matter of fact, while the accumulation of entries carries the weight. It is less about a single moment and more about duration.

Byron Kim, Sunday Painting (6-16-24), 2024, Acrylic and pencil on panel, 14 x 14 in at James Cohan Gallery, New York. © Byron Kim 2024. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by GC Photography.

The Sky and the Grounding of Scale

Against the specificity of the text, the sky remains open. It does not illustrate the writing. It holds it.

“There’s something about putting this very small snippet of my life next to something so big,” Kim reflects. “Both sides of it have something to do with love.” He describes it as love of relationships on one side, and love of the world on the other.

The pairing creates a shift in scale that is both visual and emotional. The text anchors the work in the everyday, while the sky extends it outward. “It’s the most outward thing we know,” he says simply.

At one point, the conversation turns to perception again, to the way the sky changes at the edge of a building. “Something weird happens visually right at that edge,” he notes. “It becomes lighter.” Everhart suggests simultaneous contrast, and Kim pauses. “Yeah, I think that’s right,” he says. “I don’t know exactly why it’s happening.”

The moment lands quietly, but it reveals something about the work. Even the sky is not neutral. It is shaped by context, by what sits beside it. Just as the text is shaped by what is left unsaid.

Detachment and Letting the Work Go

If the paintings are intimate, Kim’s relationship to them is not. He describes a surprising detachment from the work once it is finished. “It’s really freeing to make the work and then just think of it as not mine anymore,” he says. “I don’t want to be attached to it.”

The scale of the series contributes to this. With hundreds of paintings, no single work carries the weight of the whole. “One painting is just a page,” he explains. “It’s not the thing itself. I kind of don’t want them to be for me,” he admits. “Maybe that’s part of why I avoid reading them.”

The paintings move outward, even as they draw from something inward. The distance is part of what allows them to exist.

Installation view of Byron Kim, Sunday Paintings, 2024 at James Cohan Gallery, New York. © Byron Kim 2024. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by GC Photography.

Language, Repetition, and Everyday Life

Language enters the work not as a literary device, but as a necessity. Kim is currently relearning Korean, his first language, and describes the process as frustrating but revealing. “What I’m lacking is output,” he says. “The language is in me, but I have to practice speaking.”

The connection to the paintings is subtle but present. Both rely on repetition, on returning to something incomplete and working through it over time. Both resist polish.

“I don’t think about the writing as something elevated,” he says. “It’s just what I’m doing or thinking about.”

That refusal of elevation is central. The paintings do not separate art from life. They collapse them into the same space, where a line about dinner carries the same weight as a line about loss.

A Structure Built on Return

By the end of the conversation, what becomes clear is that the Sunday Paintings are less about any individual entry than about the act of returning. Each week resets the structure. Each painting begins again. The work does not resolve. It accumulates.

Kim describes them as something close to amateur in the original sense of the word, rooted in love rather than mastery. They are made quickly, without overworking, without the pressure of refinement. “If they took all day, I would never make them,” he says.

That constraint becomes a kind of freedom. The paintings remain open, provisional, and ongoing.

In a moment that feels almost offhand, but lands with clarity, Kim reflects on the conditions that make the work possible. “We’re lucky to be able to do this,” he says. “To even think about painting.”

It is a simple statement, but it reframes everything around it. The sky, the text, the repetition, the restraint. Each painting becomes less a statement and more a gesture of attention. A way of marking time without trying to hold it in place.

And in that space between the small and the vast, something steady emerges. Not resolution, but a kind of quiet continuity.

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