Youngmi KIM:
"Drawing or painting with traditional techniques often results in flat, one-dimensional works. For several years, I’ve sought to move beyond that, developing alternative approaches.
I often use my bare hands instead of brushes—an instinctive, regressive gesture that anchors the body in the act of painting, transforming it into a four-dimensional experience.
I also project moving images onto discs, creating a form of “mobile painting,” or “four-dimensional pictorial art,” where the body seems animated by overlapping gazes. Like Orlan’s ever-changing “Techno Body,” shifting light alters perception.
My work is intimately tied to the body—specifically mine, inherited from my mother, complete with its flaws and suffering, like a cyst once removed. It’s also a tribute to this fragile genetic link. Unable to pass life on myself, I try to preserve a bodily memory destined to vanish.
For nearly thirty years, I’ve pursued an aesthetic inquiry into the body, which, in the past decade, has evolved into a family narrative. Through images, I draw and erase, rebuild and forget—a dual process reflecting both hope and loss.
Drawing becomes a way to inhabit the present, to reveal the ephemeral, to allow a body to survive. What remains is neither past nor future, but a visual memory repeated, carried by the hand that traces it. The act of adding flesh to the skeletal body of an 86-year-old woman becomes a fiction that speaks to life’s transience. Drawing rekindles life’s hope; erasing helps let go of ancestral pain."