KIYA KIM

_INTERVIEW

_ BIO

B. South Korea. Lives and works in New York, NY

Since relocating from Seoul to New York in 2008, she has pursued a dynamic, transnational practice that bridges institutional exhibitions, independent projects, and brand collaborations. Her work spans galleries, museums, ephemeral interventions, and socially engaged platforms, reflecting a fluid movement between formal and experimental modes of presentation.

Trained in Fine Art in Korea and holding an MFA in Art Practice from the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, Kim synthesizes dual cultural perspectives with a rigorously developed artistic language. Influenced by fashion editorials in her formative years, she developed a sharp sensitivity to structure, surface, and color—qualities that now shape the compositional rhythm of her work. The open, formless energy of New York’s cultural terrain continues to inform her conceptual frameworks and spatial intuitions.

She has collaborated with Leeum Museum of Art, Hyundai Motors, Atelier Jolie, and MCM, creating works that bridge poetic materiality with conceptual clarity. Her solo exhibitions have been presented at venues such as Museum Ground and the Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art. Most recently, she was invited to present a pop-up at The Bass Museum of Art in Miami. Expanding her artistic practice into publishing, she released Wavering Soliloquy on Amazon—an art book combining her photographs and writings—further extending her exploration of language, solitude, and sensory reflection.

Her work engages the space between language and material, offering new modes of perception through interdisciplinary experimentation.

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_ STATEMENT

Kiya Kim’s practice emerges from an interdisciplinary approach that weaves together mixed media, installation, video, writing, and object-based intervention into a single, multilayered linguistic system. These mediums do not function as separate domains; rather, they operate as an integrated grammar through which Kim probes the unstable thresholds between visual form and linguistic structure. For her, interdisciplinarity is not a matter of expanding mediums but a fundamental method for reconfiguring how language shapes and mediates lived experience.

Her work begins in the fractures of language—those moments where naming, classification, and interpretation destabilize, slip, or fall apart. Moving through these fissures, Kim traces the emergence of new sensorial logics and spatial structures. Across her practice, disparate mediums converge into a unified field of expanded language.

Her works often unfold as spatial poems—constellations of surface, rhythm, interval, and silence. Colors dissolve into structural layers; textures shift through repetition, erasure, and reassembly; found objects are estranged from their original contexts and recomposed into nonlinear syntaxes. These interdisciplinary layers generate visual dissonances that open into expanded terrains of meaning, inviting viewers not to decode but to dwell within the material and linguistic vibrations of the work.

Material, for Kim, is not inert matter but a pre-linguistic utterance. Her process begins with tactile engagement: pigment, fabric, debris, fragments, and light form a nonverbal grammar that acts more immediately than speech. Through gathering, dismantling, and recomposition, she draws out emotional residues and subconscious rhythms, shaping an intermaterial syntax that bridges inner states and external spatialities. In this sense, material choreography becomes a linguistic field in its own right.

Ambiguity is not a lack but a generative force within her work. Human communication is built upon misreadings, divergences, and slippages; Kim dwells within these unstable intervals to uncover new linguistic possibilities. Language—spoken, written, gestural, material—remains perpetually incomplete and in motion, and the interdisciplinary elements within her practice sustain this openness rather than resolve it.

Writing functions not as an explanation but as a parallel linguistic act. Her texts vibrate alongside her visual forms, governed by rhythm, resonance, opacity, and pause. Images and words do not translate one another; instead, they inhabit adjacent fields, extending each other through proximity. Rhythm and stillness, color and material, text and object ultimately converge as multiple manifestations of a single, expanded language system.

Ultimately, Kim proposes language as an open, interdisciplinary field—one that encompasses matter and color, speech and silence, rhythm and structure, and the unutterable spaces in between. Her work cultivates sensitivity to the unstable and unresolved, inviting viewers to remain, to attune, and to feel within what resists definitive articulation.

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