EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Yongjae Kim
I paint everyday places while adopting the perspective of someone preparing to depart. Viewed through this lens, ordinary landscapes are recontextualized, appearing as vivid but distant memories. Based on actual locations, I compose each scene through a subjective process, using a realistic representational style with my imagination.
The environments I depict often reflect dissatisfaction, incompleteness, and discomfort, shaped by experiences including unstable living conditions as a foreigner, financial instability, exposure to life-threatening events, and the ongoing risk of vision loss due to a retinal disorder. These circumstances have informed my awareness of impermanence and the provisional nature of existence.
This recognition has led me to perceive myself as a traveler within my own life, observing not only the temporary character of my surroundings but also the transience of the traveler.
My work engages with the tensions between permanence and transience, absence and presence, and reality and imagination. Rather than emphasizing despair, the paintings reflect a subdued form of hope and a desire for permanence within the instability of experience. Through this process, familiar landscapes are transformed into spaces that suggest an unattainable but persistent longing for stability within impermanence.
