Chris Jin Kim

Bill Brady Gallery is pleased to present The Depth of Being Blue, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Chris Jin Kim.

Chris Jin Kim’s second show with Bill Brady Gallery, and first in Los Angeles, represents a corpus of work that has been produced over the past year. These nine paintings in acrylic on canvas, each 6 by 4 feet, form a kind of loose narrative dealing with issues of abandonment, stilted childhood, and fractured families, with an emphasis on an increasingly complex use of color and the presence of Kim’s trademark and astonishing “triggers”: painted trompe l’oeil (“fool the eye”) details that suggest meaning.

The artist has only ever exhibited twenty-one pictures. Meticulous in her method, she has been painting for but five years. Kim was born in 1986 in Oakland, CA, to a Korean American family. She attended a Catholic high school where she took an Advanced Placement class in Studio Art, demonstrating an early affinity for drawing, an appreciation of cartoons, and a general interest in animation but without considering it as a career. Kim later attended Parsons School of Design in New York and took some classes at UC Berkeley, graduating in 2009. Since that time, she has worked in Los Angeles and is now back in New York in the fashion industry and magazine publishing, taking up painting in 2017. In that same year, she began regularly going to museums; this has had a bountiful effect on her recent work, which recalls a myriad of modern masters, from Turner to Boccioni to Miró.

In the present display, there are seven works in a series titled The Depth of Being Blue, unified both thematically and compositionally, and two pictures titled Wrecked and Havoc that serve as narrative preludes. Kim has retained the small and brightly colored pennant forms (that she terms “shapework”) in her compositions, organizing elements that often, in their dissipation, convey a chaotic reality. Wrecked torques us into the 1970s, with Mattel Hot Wheels careening across the surface. It bears a similarity to her previous series of pictures, made during early Covid in 2020-21, in which heavy dark clouds expand like nebulae across prismatic, pennant-flecked fields. Wrecked resembles a landscape, with a bank of mustard paint at the bottom reading as ground, and then a rising tumult of childlike scrawled cars and forms in a band in the lower third, giving way to a vast grey and black storm cloud above that subsumes all. In the center is a meticulously painted vintage Fisher-Price suburban house, with its detachable staircase, and in its lawn, a porcelain figurine of a reclining blonde female nude. Here, in the earliest work produced for this show, Kim adopted a new method of fully painting in a layer of pennants and then using washes of acrylic to occlude their forms. I have written elsewhere that the “trigger” elements flit through these compositions, like Dorothy’s visions of her family and the Wicked Witch seen out the bedroom window of her storm-tossed farmhouse in the opening tornado sequence in The Wizard of Oz. This picture takes up that challenge resolutely, especially in the toy and architectonic outlined houses, crude childlike inverted automobiles, and meticulously observed fire and police department vehicles that get caught up in the whipping tumult. Halfway up the center-right section is an open and empty prescription bottle with a label reading “Percocet” and jokingly bearing the artist’s name. But the seriousness of the image lies in its powerfully evocative image of the American family in chemical and emotional chaos. The song that comes to mind is Liz Phair’s exquisite and heartbreaking “Little Digger” (2003).

Kim does not work from sketches but approaches the canvas alla prima, without resolved underdrawings and working directly on the surface, wet on wet paint. In Havoc, the overall tonality is red, and the various details allude to further fracturing and symbolic assignments of roles and blame. There are two halves of a ripped Queen of Hearts playing card; a torn fragment of a Joker card, pointedly bearing the image of a king and not a jester; a restaurant marmalade container that reads “SCHMUCK” instead of Smucker’s; and for the first time, Kim has used R&F pigment sticks to scrawl text on the surface, in emulation of one of her artistic forbears, Cy Twombly. But instead of the elevated names of Homeric heroes or mythological characters, Kim has written “STRIKE,” “STAY OUT/GET OUT/NO/WAY OUT,” in a technique closer to the creepy texts that little Danny writes on doors in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) than Twombly’s epic oil script. Menace predominates. In Havoc, the pennants have lost their perpendicularity, those semiotic markers of feeling in her work gone haywire.

The suite of seven works that comprise The Depth of Being Blue continue the technics of the above two works but form a panoramic tableau that sees Kim working in a new and extravagant color key. The first four are visually connected through a sweeping flow of detritus of pennants, triggers, and symbols that flow across the four related canvases from upper left to the bottom of I and II, rising to the center of III, and then exploding into space in IV. It reads like a galactic belt ribboning through deep space or, simultaneously per the details described below, as a trail of flotsam and jetsam coursing through the ocean depths. And look – there is a perfectly observed frogman, in red, chained to a chest of jewels, and another deep-sea diver, this one in black with white flippers, and at the same time, there are pills and candy mini-Valentine hearts (“BE MINE,” “I LO VE YOU,” “ROUGH SEX,” “DRUNK”), Air Force jets, and ejected pilots. Along the bottom and contiguous among panels I and II is scrawled “MISSION ABORTED,” while at the top, the plaintive line: “LOVE ME.”

Part of the engagement of Kim’s art is spotting and identifying the triggers. They are painted in the challenging acrylic medium, in a way that beggars belief. Like that earlier self-taught American artist in Boston in the 1700s, John Singleton Copley, who displayed an uncanny and remarkable ability to convey material and textures in the clothing and accouterments of his sitters that said everything about their aspirational personas, Kim’s immaculately conveyed details carry the social context of the pictures. But in the final three works of The Depth of Being Blue, while the spiraling family dynamic established in the earlier pictures (as signified in the 1980s Nintendo Game Boy whose screen reads “GAME/OVER” in image IV), the psychological chaos is subsumed by aesthetic ebullience. The shapework recedes. Golden clouds in V hover over Turnerian fields of energized and gestural blues as in that English Romantic artist’s series of images of The Burning of the Houses of Parliament (oils in Cleveland and Philadelphia, and many related watercolors). Dimly in the upper reaches, we read, “I AM/GOOD.” In image VII, there is a floating white candy lifesaver. And in the center, a clearing of sorts. A respite from the storm.

—Jason Rosenfeld, Ph.D., is Professor of Art History, Marymount Manhattan College, New York, and Senior Writer and Editor-at-Large at The Brooklyn Rail