Cindy Ji Hye Kim

October 21, 2025

Cindy Ji Hye Kim (b. 1990 Incheon, South Korea) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013 and her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2016. Recent solo exhibitions include: Casey Kaplan, New York (2025); Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles (2025); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2024); Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway (2022); and MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge (2020). Kim has shown in group exhibitions at: Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2025); Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2022); and Art Gallery of York University, Canada (2019). Kim’s work has been featured in ArtForum, Art in America, ArtAsiaPacific, BOMB Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Her work is in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence; the University of Chicago, Chicago; and Sifang Art Museum, China. She currently lives and works in New York City.

As we’re sitting here at your second solo show with Casey Kaplan, can we start with the title, “Saboteur: A Prehistoric Wish,” and the inspiration behind the exhibition?

Titles usually come last for me. Much like painting, it’s a process of free association. The show’s themes have a lot to do with fall and winter, a period of closures and endings. So I was thinking about what it means to end things on one’s own terms, and I thought about the word “saboteur,” a kind of self-sabotage, as a way to reawaken yourself. “A prehistoric wish” is a Freudian term for happiness rooted not in material things but in an unfulfilled childhood wish. For a long time, my work has explored the concept of death. Recently, I’ve been thinking especially about the concept of the Death Drive, a kind of force that can paradoxically propel life forward.

Can you talk a bit about these wooden figures that are guiding visitors throughout the show? They’re quite different from how you had interacted with wood in your previous work.

I came across the Kokdu figures while researching for the show in a book called Treasures of Korea. I had seen these figures before at the National Museum of Korea; they are ceremonial figurines used in traditional funerary practices. I found them cute and joyous, and the juxtaposition with death was really interesting.

For a long time, I avoided referencing Korean art because, growing up, it was taught in a nationalistic, patriotic way. It felt cliché or too close to home. As I moved away from that, I became more drawn to ancient Korean objects because they felt less familiar.

Previously, I had done CNC woodwork on the backs of stretcher bars, but I began to feel uneasy about outsourcing that process to machines. I wanted to figure out a way to fully integrate the process of carving wood into my practice and imbue that process with meaning. So with the making of Kokdu figures, which were traditionally used as guardians escorting the deceased into the next realm, I wanted to transmit and embody this particular cultural knowledge by carving them myself, as my own gesture of performing an end or a closure. I actually carved these figures two years ago, when I first presented them in Korea during Frieze. I displayed them alongside the paintings at eye level, but for this show, it made more sense to position them above eye level, like bodyguards of the space as people walk in. Upon closer inspection, though, they appear friendly and inviting; dancing, playing instruments.

Can you speak about your relationship to materiality within the exhibition?

I love talking about materials, and I think if you ask any painter, that’s all they really care about. I’ve been working with graphite and charcoal with different shades of black pigments for a while, and it all started from a desire to make better drawings.

I feel like drawing is at the foundation of everyone’s practice; even for a poet, a writer, or a musician with their notations. There’s something very immediate about having a pencil or pen in hand. For the longest time, you’re taught that drawing is just a preliminary step, a skeletal structure that is waiting to be fully formed into a painting with color. At some point, I wanted to collapse that hierarchy of drawing and painting in my studio process.

I’ve been working with a grayscale palette called grisaille, a traditional Renaissance painting technique that uses multiple layers of underpainting before being glazed over with color. I thought it was a beautiful metaphor for the gesture of bringing the unconscious to the conscious. And this is at the core of what I want to do as a painter.

The texts for the show references the pictorial tradition of medieval calendars as an inspiration for this exhibition. How does that historical reference inform your approach?

I’ve always been attracted to medieval art. My entry point was probably through biblical art in church settings, like stained glass and frescos, and various architectural elements of cathedrals. I learned that these pictorial and ornamental elements were mostly created for illiterate churchgoers, illustrating biblical scenes such as the Passion of Christ.

As an image maker, that’s the ultimate fantasy, to communicate something through a universal, pictorial language. I’ve always disliked the idea that one has to learn how to look at pictures, which feels especially true in contemporary art. I’m inspired by Chomsky’s theory of language, which argues that we are innately born to acquire language. In a similar vein, I think we are born with an innate ability to respond to art and beauty, a prehistoric language of our collective unconscious.

I’ve also been looking at genre paintings, such as the works of Jean-François Millet and Pieter Bruegel. There’s a joyous connection to nature in their work. Contemporary art historians may critique the fetishization of farm laborers or the class dynamics between peasants and lords, but as a painter, that doesn’t take away the joy of looking at these paintings. There’s something powerful about the lack of interiority depicted in them, which is a stark contrast to portraits of aristocrats, lords, and ladies from that era. To me, these genre scenes offer a connection to nature and the world, a connection to something that is bigger than oneself. This feels compelling to me as a contemporary person who often feels disconnected from my environment. That became a starting point for thinking about the medieval calendars.

Can you talk about your letter series and how it relates to translation, education, and understanding?

The letter series is foundational to my studio practice. It started when Korean letters started to look like pure shapes and forms to me, almost as if I were looking at Sanskrit, Arabic, or Hebrew, which are languages I have no direct connection to or cerebral understanding of. With Korean, though, it’s my first language and my mother tongue. But after years of not using it on a regular basis, and with English becoming my main language, I started noticing the geometric and rectilinear nature of the characters.

Realizing this, I thought it could be an interesting way to think about image-making. In 2019, I began drawing scaffolds and architectural elements that reminded me of Korean characters; the vowels as circles and the consonants as edges or hinges. Then I added a figure into the composition and thought about the fluid feeling of the vowels moving inside the mouth.

That became a productive way to create distance from my paintings. The works didn’t need to be about a story or a narrative; they could simply reflect what it means to breathe or how the body engages with the restricted limits of the canvas. Fast forward to now, I’m still using that system to generate compositions. The subjects have since shifted to farming tools: a scythe, sickle, or plough, and how they mirror bodily skeletal structures.

Given your tactful relationship with Korean tradition. How does showing in Korea compare to showing in the U.S.? Do the emotional charges feel different?

Thinking about my relationship to my Korean identity means accepting that I had gone through a lot of Americanization ha, and that that’s also part of who I am. There’s a certain aspect of myself I can’t get back, and nor do I want to. This constant acceptance of environmental and personal changes is, I think, what makes life beautiful.

Showing in Korea or using Korean references in my art almost feels like I’m an archaeologist; I just have to keep digging and be surprised at what I find. For me, the job of an artist is, once I’ve found something, I then have to make familiar things unfamiliar and translate the unfamiliar into something more familiar. So that we can look at the world from a different perspective, or see ourselves differently, and be surprised by what we find.

So much of art-making feels autobiographical; the kind of narrative we tell ourselves: this is who I am, this is what happened to me, and therefore this is the art I make. But the experience of reality is never like that. There are multiple timelines unfolding in different ways, and all we can do is grasp little bits and pieces and try to make meaning out of them. The meaning lies in this process of gathering those fragments, not in the finished product.

Cindy Ji Hye Kim

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