Wyoming Arts Council

New Cultural Resources Intern


Miracle of Science, oil and ink jet print on canvas, 48″x48″, 2008

My name is Ji Eun Kim, and I just started working at Wyoming Arts Council and The State Museum as a Cultural Resources intern. I was born in Korea and currently live in Cheyenne. I received a B.F.A and a M.F.A from Seoul National University, and recently received a M.F.A degree in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. I completed a summer residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, and I’ve been awarded a full fellowship at Vermont Studio Center for a 4-week residency later this year.

The major interest of my work lies in capturing institutionalized aspects of ordinary life. My previous works focused on the ‘regulated landscape’ of Seoul, Korea. Upon moving to the US, I recognized how the different scale affected the land use pattern in contrast to Korea. While the repetitive cityscape of Seoul was a product of regulation, the homogenized landscape of suburbia is the result of safe investments made by developers, mimicking successes of previous projects.

The experience of living in the Metro Detroit area provides me the opportunity to rethink the meaning of development and to consider cities as whole organic systems in the post-industrial era. Downtown/suburb, shrinking city/growing city and urbanization/de-urbanization—these sound antonymous but are closely connected. This perception allows me to look into one place while thinking about any other place in that socio-economic context.

In my work, I’ve used collage to make a social comment on various levels. I employ collage as a compositional method in painting in general, and I experiment with paper-cut collage as a drawing. I recently started using object collage to show the details of developers’ material choices and the way our world is being constructed. Along with these collages, I juxtapose different painting styles, making reference to painting history. The way I construct paintings to using collage reflects my psychological position between two different cultures. Through these paintings, which are based on my fragmented and mixed cultural experience, I provide to my audience the experience of multi-spaces within the painting as well as multiple viewpoints about society.

Planned Obsolescence, oil, latex paint, shims, cardboard, boxes on canvas, 60″x70″, 2009

Dream House, oil and grout on canvas, 60″x80″, 2009

http://www.insaartspace.or.kr/exhibitionsEN.asp?idx=58
http://jieunkim25.blogspot.com/

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