bio and statement
Cultural Assimilation
“I am a mixed media visual artist, explorer and educator. My current obsessions and interests include historical remnants, human memory, the way we experience time and space, human constructs that have been created to aid us in understanding the world around us, the desire to explore the unknown and the concept of artists as wanderers.
My goal with my work is to create visual objects that are layered with these concepts: the past, the present, the future, fragmentation, artifacts and imagination layered on top of one another. Recently, I have begun to use images of antipodal landmass as well as archetypical mythological icons as visual metaphors. They are representative of my musings and reflections on the irreversibility of time as I search for a sense of redemption, acceptance and letting go while being connected to the world around me in every time period. Each day, the wind moves, people move, water moves, the earth moves, I move and time happens.
Ann Kim is a Korean-American mixed-media artist. She has a BFA in Art Practice and BA in Art History from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Studio Art from Mills College. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally through solo and group exhibitions. She has also received numerous grants, fellowships, and awards including the Murphy & Cadogan Fellowship from San Francisco Arts Commission, Sarah Lewis Painting Fellowship, IU New Frontiers Exploratory Travel Grant, and IU East Summer Faculty Fellowship, and IU East Faculty Research Support Fund. She has completed residencies at Art Farm (NE), The Rensing Center (SC), Brush Creek Ranch (WY), Arterra (Portugal), Pinea-Linea de Costa (Spain), ArteStudioGinestrelle (Italy), Earthskin (New Zealand). Her work is in part of collection at the University of Texas-Tyler, The Greater Columbus Convention Center, and numerous private collections. She is currently an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Indiana University East in Richmond, IN.
Ann B. Kim, Dayton, OH
Ann Kim’s Show at the City Center Gallery
Cultural identity and assimilation
September 2019 – “Romancing and Traversing: Erasing Borders”
September 2019 @Not Sheep
Romancing and Traversing: Erasing Borders
In 2017, I took two massive research trips that were both deeply personal and political. I circumnavigated the globe during which time I completed the Trans-Siberian Railway and lived in two antipodal places in Southern Spain and Northern New Zealand, only one hour away from their exact antipodal coordinates, making them virtually the farthest places from each other I could possibly live in. Within this current political climate, I wanted to experience Russia, not as a caricatured stereotype we see in American media, but with real people, and not just Moscow or St. Petersburg. I did this by completing the longest railway possible, eating and sleeping with many of them on these long rides, and visiting cities both rural and metropolitan. I was a bit of a voyeur and a total outsider, but I discovered a place that was vastly different from what I had expected, and realized once again that borders are artificial, and we humans hold so much empathy capable of erasing those borders.
While living in two geographically opposing places on Spain and New Zealand, much of my work was about personal redemption, acceptance, and letting go as I was going through a major shift in my personal. However, on a broader level, much of the work was about again, erasing borders of both place and time: North is not up, and one’s east is someone else’s west, and time is irreversible. In the end, we are all stuck together on this spherical earth, coexisting together, where water cycles over and over again, but slightly differently each time.
The show comprises of paintings, photography, and video that were created based on my experiences during these two trips as well as my reflections of them the past 1.5 years. Fragmented and yet whole, this big, vast world is made up of individuals that are more similar than different, and at an individual level, even the biggest differences among us are all here to there in the end no matter how much fear-mongering in mass media we live through.
Romancing and Traversing: Erasing Borders an installation artwork