.jpg)
Bio
Doi Kim holds a BFA in Fine Arts from the Korea National University of Arts in Seoul, South Korea, and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, USA. Her works are grounded in a printmaking practice, but often borrow from installation practices, animation, and performance. Her trip to South America, where she encountered a magnificent natural landscape, inspired her to explore this experience's complexity and sensuosity. Her artistic practice presents questions to reinstate the experiential quality of inscribed history to emancipate ourselves from the dominant narrative, which often reproduces inequality of the current world. She also performs visual experiments of materialistic imagination through her work. She has shown her work in group exhibitions at Ethan Cohen Kube, SVA Gallery, Rear Window Gallery in Hangzhou, China, Untitled Art Miami Beach, and Stone leaf retreat during upstate art weekend.
.jpg)
Artist Statement
My prints, videos, and installations feature mythical creatures with human characteristics, non-human proxies that simulate the human experience. They may grow, move, and speak in anthropomorphic ways, but they have intensely fluid relationships to the grounds from which they emerge.
Much of my work depicts sensory organs in ways that are visceral and strange. The body is where we encounter the world. It is where we hold traumas, both personal and intergenerational, that shape the stories that make us who we are. But nothing is fixed in this landscape. Our cellular and perceptual states are fluid and changeable. My work aims to heighten, reimagine, and emphasize the imaginative possibilities of this space. These sensory representations invite new ways of thinking and feeling, the encounter between bodies and collective identities.
Pearls (2021) consists of 12 silkscreen prints. Taken together, Pearls represent the psychological landscape of a more inclusive society. Pearls form when an irritant invades into the shell. As a defense mechanism, the shell secretes a fluid composed of the mother of pearl to wrap the foreign organism. I think of the pearl as a metaphor for an identity constructed in an environment of diverse collisions. Pearls (2021) invites the viewer to consider how we can be hospitable to external factors and accept them as part of ourselves. Inspired by my experience as an Asian woman during the lockdown, I decided to depict the pearl-creatures as more active agents, transforming their shape following the primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary shifts in biological protein structures. The pearls, symbolizing individuals who internalize their experiences of cultures or communities that are very different from themselves, are now evolving into a new form, intertwining with other pearls. Just as proteins can evolve to compose various forms of life, the pearls open to new compositions to represent individuals with different histories.
