Meet TAE RIM KIM

We recently connected with TAE RIM KIM and have shared our conversation below.

TAE RIM, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.

I determined to be an artist early. I have enjoyed drawing and painting since I was young. Every time I have seen artworks and paintings, I feel moved as they come out to me mysterious unexplainably. Also, art gives people questionable and phenomenal resonance depending on their cultures, environment, and perspective. Although I have had a hard time to deal with doing art, making art is so sublime for me, which makes me keep doing it. I want to be an artist as my art gives people impression and resonance.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I am from South Korea and I am an artist. I’m usually doing painting of where I am from, South Korea. I was raised in a slum, which is called “Geumho San”, a place so impoverished and soon to disappear in our society, where the locals were constantly forced and threatened by today’s society to give up their land and homes. However, this poverty-stricken town where others saw adversity and hardship, was my beloved home playground; A place where I saw a silver lining. To represent, question, manifest and re-define our world’s concept of true beauty as well as to console the alienated, stereotyped, and forgotten, my home, inspired me to paint. Through this oil paint, I render the tactile of quality of these memories, with complex structures now blurred and colors muted by the passage of time. With a raw immediacy and tenderness, I loose brushstrokes to create instability of my retrospect and build up geometry shapes of flat plane that come out to me intensive. Also, lump and thick of oil is a few examples to capture snapshots of a reality and recollection. This process transforms the landscape into a canvas of abstracted chaos, prompting viewers to interpret involving imagery of my personal recollections.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

First of all, when it comes to the three qualities, I would say steadiness, confidence and overcome. Steadiness is important for people to reach out their field. It helps people to get a goal and expertise. In terms of confidence, it doesn’t make people give up. With confidence, people can have their fields steadily and easily. People usually face failure when they pursue their goal. However, overcome helps them to approach success and to develop further. People can feel frustration during their journey but I would like to say just keep doing it for your goal. I believe people can make their goal if they have passion. Second, in terms of skills, only practice is to get skills. I have practiced a lot to make my own visual language for my painting. In the last, as for areas of knowledge, art history is the important one for me. To understand contemporary art, I need to acquire art history to get knowledge of it.

If you knew you only had a decade of life left, how would you spend that decade?

How I can change my art is my challenge recently. I try to deviate painting by using materials on my canvas and I’m doing experiment this and that as I don’t confine painting. The reason I attempt something new is that I want to do art with broad perspective. When it comes to my experiment, I try utilizing concrete, thick oil, lump of acrylic, glitter, etc by putting them on canvas. Even if there have been lots of failure, it is going positive so I look forward to seeing outcome.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: k_taerim_