Multihyphenate artist Joeun Kim Aatchim (b. South Korea) is a prodigious diarist. Over the last decade and across an ever-growing breadth of media—poetry, print compilation, etching and engravature, drawing, painting, installation, and audio-video formats—Aatchim has interwoven her rigorous, expansive art-making practice with a meticulous catalog of her adult life. Her major themes have come to include matters of illness and healing, trauma and personal faith, familial histories, reconciliations, and not least of all ongoing negotiations as a South Korean immigrant to the United States. Integral to her practice at nearly all levels are “drafts”—the initial, intermediate, and indeterminate stages in the process of art-making that for Aatchim prove rich in both pedagogy and poetics. From diaphanous silk paintings whose fugitive, multilayered translucent surfaces metaphorize the artist’s own experience of sight and space, to time-based installations that augment, transform, and dissipate throughout the course of their presentation, Aatchim’s work centers an inquisitive, unabashedly idiosyncratic study of memory, language, and the labors of self-reflection.
Joeun Kim Aatchim is a visual artist based in New York City. Aatchim received her BFA from New York University, as well as her MFA from Columbia University. Recent solo exhibitions include François Ghebaly, Los Angeles and New York, USA; Gladstone Gallery, Seoul, Korea; Travesia Cuatro, Guadalajara, Mexico; Make Room, Los Angeles, USA; and Harper’s, East Hampton, USA. Recent group exhibitions include Aranya Art Center, Beidaihe, China; Harper’s, New York, USA; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, USA; Jeffrey Deitch, New York, USA; and The Drawing Center, New York, USA. Aatchim has received awards and fellowships at Corporation of Yaddo; Triangle Art Association; The Drawing Center; and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture.
