_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 explores the boundaries of language, perceiving it not as a fixed system of social conventions but as an expanded sensory domain that encompasses color, materiality, silence, and rhythm. At the core of her practice, internally generated sentences, colors, and material layers are replayed as a form of intuitive choreography. By juxtaposing the accumulation, combination, and harmonious material intervention of pigments with atypical structures, Kim generates a fluid emotional play that resists pre-determined, controlled interpretation.
For Kim, materiality functions as a pre-linguistic utterance. Pigments, fabrics, found objects, and intentional layering replace the explicit explanations of social language, forming a non-verbal grammar that generates meaning through aesthetic tension. Her work does not seek to explain concepts; instead, it focuses on constructing the very “conditions” under which meaning emerges, collapses, and is reconfigured.
This artistic practice is deeply rooted in a reflection on the inherent inadequacies of human narrative. Originating from a fundamental inquiry into the powerlessness of conventional language and social conventions in the face of life’s ultimate transitions, Kim’s work expands the very concept of language. She repositions language not as a tool for information transfer, but as an unstable sensory field composed of materiality and color.
Ultimately, Kim’s work does not rest on the fixed question of what language means. Instead, she poses a profound question: how is meaning physically sensed in its pre-formal state? Through this inquiry, she offers viewers a new mode of perception grounded in bodily awareness and aesthetic ambiguity.
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KIYA KIM 