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\n\tIn Joeun Kim Aatchim\u2019s paintings\u2014butshe calls them drawings\u2014everything is so vivid, yet so elusive. Her line feels definitive, yet the images they convey seem to fade away into sheer luminosity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tHer works are typically painted using mineral pigment in shellac\u2014sometimes with watercolor, pastel, or other materials\u2014on layers of silk that, stretched across frames, show through to the wall behind. They\u2019re all about one image being seen through another\u2014not different things, in the manner of Francis Picabia\u2019s transparencies, but different versions of the same thing; different attempts, a little like the way Henri Matisse would partially overpaint his works to show multiple thoughts about how to depict one thing, or how to position it within the composition.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tAatchim speaks about her method as being a layering of first drafts. \u201cRather than working on a piece over and over to make it perfect,\u201d she told me, \u201cI can keep my first thought\u201d even as the piece develops. The result is a bouquet of essays, finding resolution in the tentative. She calls what she does \u201cdrawing\u201d because she considers it \u201ca thought in progress,\u201d and because her materials never completely cover the surface she\u2019s working on. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if it\u2019s pencil or chalk or paint. If it doesn\u2019t cover the surface, I consider that a drawing, whether it\u2019s on the floor, on the street, or on the wall, or an object.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe Korean-born artist has been exhibiting widely since earning her MFA at Columbia University in 2017, where she\u2019d gone at the suggestion of Kiki Smith, to whom she\u2019d been an assistant. Since then, she\u2019s had solo shows at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Guadalajara, Seoul, and Madrid. Coming later this year is her first exhibition in S\u00e3o Paulo, at Almeida & Dale. I caught up with Aatchim not in her Brooklyn studio but in Seoul, by Zoom, while she was visiting her parents. Was she working there? \u201cI tried to rest, but I don\u2019t know how to rest, and I don\u2019t have any hobbies,\u201d she said. \u201cI started thinking, maybe I\u2019m nobody if I\u2019m not making art. So I started making work in the dining room.\u201d In any case, she added, the materials she likes to use are more readily available in Korea than in New York.<\/p>\n
\n\tBut maybe, her real material is mnemonic. She considers her vivid sense of recall to be both a blessing and a curse. She explains that \u201cmemories I haven\u2019t drawn yet keep lingering in my head, and have to be stored somewhere. You know, because I stored this somewhere safe, I can now get new memories.\u201d That probably explains why her simple yet multilayered portraits of friends and observations of her everyday world can be at once so clear and distinct yet so intangible. After all, memories can\u2019t be fixed. They\u2019re always thoughts in progress.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/New-Talent-2026-Web-Banner_JK.jpg?w=1000″] In Joeun Kim Aatchim\u2019s paintings\u2014butshe calls them drawings\u2014everything is so vivid, yet so elusive. Her line feels definitive, yet the images they convey seem to fade away into sheer luminosity.\u00a0 Her works are typically painted using mineral pigment in shellac\u2014sometimes with watercolor, pastel, or other materials\u2014on layers of silk that, stretched across […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2088182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2088182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2088182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2088182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2088182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2088182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2088182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}