Sung Hwa Kim

Sung Hwa Kim (b. 1985) is an artist based in New York City. He received a BFA from The Art Institute of Boston in 2008 and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2012.

Instagram | Website

memory/

My first experience with art was in my junior year of high school. Before that, I had no experience with or interest in art. I had no extraordinary talent. I didn’t draw as a kid. When I was a junior, we went on a field trip to MoMA and I saw this vibrant orange, yellowish painting. I didn’t know what abstract art was, but I was drawn to it. Before that, I told my parents I didn’t want to go to college, I was going to get a job and start my career. That experience changed my mind. I was already behind; since I was already a junior, I needed to make a college portfolio in a month or two.

Later, I realized what I saw at MoMA. It was a Rothko painting. But that memory stuck with me. People say it’s cliche to feel something by looking at a Rothko, but his paintings are emotional, like music. They’re simply composed of color and form. It was something I never experienced in the past.

Art school was my first experience with painting. No one in my family works in creative fields, so it was a surprise to them. People say you need talent to make art, but I don’t buy it. Talent is not something you’re born with or God-given. You need a will and desire to be an artist.

line/

I go on a lot of bike rides. Every season is different and I need to collect a lot of images. I’m always taking videos and photos, just collecting images even if I won’t use them immediately. I’m absorbing the urban landscape, but I know that anything I come up with as an artist is not original. There is a lineage of artists that inform the choices I make. Even if I’m painting the same Brooklyn cityscape in 2024 that Edward Hopper painted in 1932, I can separate myself by painting the unique time I live in. The feeling and meaning should be different.

If I begin drawing and sketching, it’s already too late. In the beginning, I tried to make so many pastel drawings, but I stopped because in doing that, I was already making a drawing. It wasn’t preparation for a painting. Drawing and painting are two separate things. Your approach could be the same, but it’s already a different medium, so you’re going to perceive it differently. Instead, I make digital sketches and photo collages, constantly playing around with the composition until I’m happy with it.

color/

I like to play with opposites. I’m interested in night and day and how at different points on Earth, one person’s night could be my day, but we’re still existing at the same time. If the window in my painting shows a night-time cityscape, the vase will be a portal to a daytime landscape. If there is a flower arrangement, the fallen petals are supposed to be dried and decayed, but I flip that, making the fallen petals glow while the flowers are ashy and gray. I think that intense, glowing light conveys a hopeful feeling in my work.

I call my paintings still lifes because it’s a play on words. They are still life arrangements, but life is never still, it’s constantly moving. I like to arrange objects in my paintings that capture passing time, like coffee cups. If the coffee is hot, you can see the steam rising, but eventually, it will become cold. Or if I include incense, I’m capturing the ephemeral moment of something burning and slowly changing form.

When I’m developing compositions and choosing objects and images, I look at it like I’m writing poetry. I create a syllabus, like a haiku, with rules and limitations. Every object in the painting needs to be intentional and carry a specific meaning, but I’m not creating a narrative. I’m evoking a feeling or creating a scene by arranging them together.

When I’m executing the painting, it’s more like jazz. Even though jazz involves improvisation, there are rules for the musicians to meet up at a certain segment so the listeners don’t get lost. But in between, it’s all about how the instruments are responding and reacting to each other. At the end of the day, painting is just color, form, and line, and you’re creating a rhythm between those elements. I treat surfaces very differently in my paintings. Certain forms are airy and hazy, then next to them will be a hard line, and then next to that will be a textured build-up. That’s a way of creating rhythm. I was making abstract paintings for a long time and it wasn’t until a few years ago that I started painting figuratively. Those fundamental elements of thinking about line, color, and form are embedded into my studio practice.