Artist Kim Young-hee continues to explore through abstraction the wonder of life she experienced in the desert. In France, she expressed the beauty around her through semi-figurative painting. In the United States, encounters with vast natural landscapes led her toward abstraction. Now working in Goseong, Gangwon Province, she is creating a desert-themed acrylic painting in the Korean No. 100 canvas format and preparing a solo exhibition for 2027.
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Kim enjoyed drawing from childhood. Her interest continued as she lived and worked in different countries, while changes in her surroundings gradually influenced the way she expressed them.
Reflecting on her work in France, she recalled the influence of the local environment. She portrayed its beauty in a semi-figurative manner, retaining recognizable forms while adding her own sensibility. In the United States, seeing and experiencing immense natural landscapes brought her work in another direction: abstraction.
Her encounter with the desert lies at the heart of this transformation. Before visiting, she had imagined it as a place without living things. Yet when she first entered the desert, she found tiny flowers, small as grains of sand, blooming there. Discovering flowers in a landscape she had assumed to be lifeless filled her with both wonder and shock.
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These small signs of life within an immense landscape remained in her memory. The desert became a place to reconsider through direct observation, beyond her earlier impression of barrenness. Her continuing desert paintings show that the encounter was more than a passing experience.
Asked how her work changed after settling in Goseong, she replied, “Even in Goseong, I still dream of the desert.” Her place of residence has changed, but the landscape she carries within her continues to inhabit her work. The large acrylic painting currently underway also expresses the desert through abstraction.
Freedom is another feeling connected to her art. Looking back on her earlier bird paintings, she said they may have expressed a desire to fly and a longing for freedom. Her answer is a reflection on the feelings behind those works rather than a definitive explanation of a fixed symbol.
 [코리안투데이]“고성에서도 사막의 꿈을”…100호 아크릴 작품으로 이어가는 자연의 기억 ©김현수 기자 |
The supplied records include Bird (1995), an acrylic work listed as 50 × 50 cm for each component, and Winter Bird (1996), an acrylic painting measuring 60 × 60 cm. They also feature Listening to Beethoven’s Fate (1991), a 91 × 73 cm oil painting. The artist did not provide further details about the circumstances behind that work in this interview.
Her exhibition history spans South Korea, France and the United States. According to the supplied biography, she held her first solo exhibition at Shinsegae Gallery in Seoul in 1992. Later solo exhibitions took place in Barbizon and Paris, France, and in Los Angeles and Orange County, United States. She also held solo exhibitions at Gallery Doin in Seoul in 2012 and 2014.
Kim does not explain the relationship between art and life in grand terms. Asked about her earlier statement that “life itself is art,” she said she simply meant that art is not separate from life, and that life, too, is art. Painting and living remain closely connected in her thinking.
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Her approach to viewers is equally clear. She focuses on her work rather than consciously addressing an audience, leaving viewers to decide what they feel. At the same time, she openly expressed her uncertainty about having works she could present with confidence. Her answers reveal both openness to interpretation and ongoing self-reflection.
Kim Young-hee is preparing a solo exhibition for 2027. Its title, dates and venue were not disclosed in this interview. Through her current desert paintings, she continues to explore how to bring to the canvas the wonder she once felt before those tiny flowers.
[ Reporter Kim Hyun-su: incheoneast@thekoreantoday.com ]
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