EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Yongjae Kim
I depict everyday places from the perspective of someone preparing to depart. Through this lens, ordinary landscapes are recontextualized, appearing vivid yet distant like memories that remain alive but just beyond reach. While my scenes are based on real locations, they are reconstructed through a subjective process, resulting in representations grounded in reality yet filtered through imagination.
The environments I portray are marked by dissatisfaction, incompleteness, and unease. These emotional undercurrents reflect my lived conditions, including the instability of life as a foreigner and the persistent risk of vision loss caused by a retinal condition. Together, these experiences shape my awareness of life’s transience and the provisional nature of existence.
From this perspective, I come to see myself as a traveler within my own life, observing not only the impermanence of my surroundings but also the fleeting nature of the one who moves through them.
My work explores the tension between permanence and transience, absence and presence, reality and imagination. Rather than emphasizing despair, my paintings hold a restrained sense of hope and a desire to move toward permanence despite instability. Familiar landscapes become spaces that evoke a longing for stability within impermanence: a yearning that cannot be fulfilled, yet quietly persists.
