Casual Date
Get Well Soon (detail)
Get Well Soon
The Wholeness
Their Presence
Untitled
(installation)
Bird of Paradise
ID: grayishblue_
Duckies From Paradise
Puddle 1 & 2: Altered Reality
Artist Bio
Jihyeon Lim is a South Korean artist living and working in San Francisco, CA. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts, Painting and Drawing, and Printmedia, from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019, and she is currently a candidate for Master of Fine Arts, in Painting and Drawing, at California College of the Arts. Employing methods of construction such as painting, drawing, printing, collaging, and sometimes merging all together to build up her narrative of mundane yet magical scenes from everyday life. She repurposes, adds, and distorts some of the images that are out of place to investigate her Asian/Western identity, mixed cultural memory, and as an ongoing attempt to materialize her experience of displacement/ideal home.
Artist Statement
When I was in 5th grade, I remember memorizing Robert Frost’s poem called ‘The Road Not Taken’ with my dad as a practice to learn English. In short, it is about a person wandering between two diverged roads. I did not know what it meant and I may still not know what it exactly means but it became significant to my life and art practice. I was born in Ulsan, South Korea, and was raised in multiple cities and countries. Having to move around frequently made me question my identity and the permanence of home. Questions turned into art. Through art, I believe I found myself.
I used to collect ordinary items in blue and purple to make my own home when I was growing up. I never gave deep thoughts to why I had this habit but now that I reflect on it, I have always liked the Korean word, Cheongsan, and the idea behind it. This means ‘blue mountain’ and it is used in old Korean poetry to mean ‘utmost paradise.’ Also in Korean, to describe the bloom of green in nature, it is said ‘It is fully blue.’ I believe having the root as a Korean and longing for my own home led me to use the color blue as the symbol of paradise.
I create the channel to my own paradisiacal world of ‘home’ in the form of abstract landscape, as painting, drawing, print media, and sometimes merge all together. I also started to incorporate ceramics very recently. In such, I fill up the empty surfaces/spaces with the ideas of transience, hope, psycho-geography of desire, and tangibility/intangibility.