Yongjae Kim is a Brooklyn based artist, originally from South Korea. He works on representational painting that depicts ordinary spaces and urban places, arising a sense of solitude, loneliness, desolation and melancholy.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Inspired by ordinary surroundings and psychological flow, my painting represents the mundane places with the subtle working of the unseen world. The intimate placesin my paintings reflect the actual environments and situations around me. Using resin based oil colors and reference of multiple snap photos, I transfer my memory fragments onto wood panel or canvas with the elaborate depiction as if I document the sites
I compose the image with my study drawings to conceive a story that is not overtly revealed on the surface, yet imagined through settings; illuminating, exaggerated color of sky, overall downed tone and mood, contrast between broad background and subjects, flat façade like a wall set in a play, traces of someone, relation among subject matters, portraying their states and the situation they are in, and distance to the objects.
The subject matters are described as they are in unstable and incomplete condition. Their inner and outer deficient states with an inherent sense of solitude and desolate emptiness even evokes existential melancholy. However, in the implied context,what they long for is imagined and awaited to be seenbeyond the surface.