Arthoods Review

When I first encountered Gyae Kim’s work, I wasn’t thinking about painting, composition, or artistic theory.

Instead, I found myself thinking about my own childhood.

As someone born in the 1990s, I belong to a generation that grew up during a period of transition. We still remember rushing home after school to watch cartoons, collecting game consoles, flipping through comics, and spending hours in front of television screens. At the same time, we witnessed the arrival of the internet, online forums, MSN Messenger, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and eventually the endless flow of images that now surrounds us every day.

Looking back, many details have faded with time.

Yet somehow, the images remain.

That was the feeling I experienced when looking at Gyae Kim’s paintings.

The characters, colours, commercial graphics, and fragments of digital culture that appear throughout her work do not necessarily belong to the same story, nor do they point towards a specific memory. Yet they evoke an immediate sense of familiarity. It is difficult to explain, but it feels similar to hearing a song from childhood after many years. You may have forgotten the lyrics, but the feeling returns instantly.

As I spent more time with her work, I began to realise that the cartoons, games, advertisements, and online imagery that surrounded us growing up were never simply forms of entertainment. Over time, they became part of how we understand ourselves and the world around us.

Perhaps they have even become a language of their own.

When people from the same generation encounter certain images, colours, symbols, or visual references, recognition happens almost instinctively. No explanation is needed. We know what they are. We know where they come from. And somewhere within them, we recognise a small part of ourselves.

What I find so compelling about Gyae Kim’s practice is that she does not simply assemble images. She assembles memories.

Her paintings bring together fragments that many of us carry unconsciously, transforming them into something both deeply personal and universally relatable. In doing so, she reminds us that the visual culture we grew up with continues to shape our identities long after we stop paying attention to it.

As an editor at Arthoods, I am genuinely delighted to have encountered Gyae Kim and her work.

Her paintings encouraged me to reflect on how much of my own life has been shaped by images. Images that I thought had long disappeared somehow remain with me, quietly influencing the way I remember, understand, and relate to the world.

Perhaps this is what makes her work so compelling. It reminds us that memories do not always return in the form of stories. Sometimes they return through colours, symbols, and familiar fragments of imagery that have stayed with us for years. We warmly invite viewers to spend time with Gyae Kim’s work and discover the visual language embedded within her paintings. You may find yourself revisiting memories you did not realise were still there.

Artist statement

As both a watcher and a transmitter, I engage with the synthetic and untamed moments of everyday life through the lens of digital culture. My work explores the pervasive voyeurism of the modern era, focusing on how we incessantly consume not only the private fragments of others' lives but also their curated tastes, aesthetics, and personal identities through the digital screen. I translate this constant flow of borrowed moments into collaged spaces that blur the boundaries between the virtual and the tangible.

I work with discarded, overlooked, and endlessly circulating images found on the internet. These visual materials function as digital waste left behind by our voyeuristic consumption. Through processes of recycling and repurposing, I extract these images from their original functions and reposition them within new visual systems. By assigning new value to what is often treated as disposable, I transform fragments of visual excess into sites of renewed meaning.

My journey as an artist began when I immigrated to the United States. While adapting to a new environment, I found refuge in the digital world. Social media and YouTube became my constant companions, serving as windows where I could observe lives and cultures from a distance. Moving between cultures through screens, I navigated displacement and connection simultaneously. This experience of watching from the periphery continues to shape how I approach images, memory, and identity.

My art functions as an interface where cyberspace and physical reality interact. I filter the influx of digital content through my perspective and reshape it into new forms that hover between screen and surface. Through these works, I invite viewers into spaces where the virtual and the tangible collide. By unsettling familiar perceptions of space and reality, my work asks how our instinctual desire to watch shapes not only what we see but also how we live within contemporary visual culture.