Sky Kim: Allure of the Abyss
ON VIEW
November 2-November 23, 2023
LOCATION
413 West Broadway
New York, NY
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Sky Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea, and attended Pratt Institute for her MFA. She is a recipient of the National Korean Art Competition Awards, a Pratt Institute Art Grant and Jersey City Art Council Grant. She has exhibited and participated in art fairs in major venues around the world, including the US, Denmark, UK, Mexico, Germany, Canada, and Australia and has been lecturing as a guest artist, panel and keynote speaker at universities and art conferences. Her work has received international critical acclaim in The Wall Street International, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Juxtapoz Magazine, The Korea Herald, Artlog and The Korea Daily, Artefuse and Arts Observer, and on WMBC-TV, and she was the subject of a profile in Forbes magazine in 2022. The artist lives and works in New York.
Chase Contemporary is pleased to announce an upcoming solo exhibition with New York-based artist Sky Kim. Known for her intricately rendered watercolor paintings, Kim’s new show Allure of the Abyss celebrates bioluminescence in the deep sea, the delicacy and gracefulness of jellyfish and other deep sea creatures, and explores the tales of underwater and lost civilizations. The exhibition will be on view from November 2nd through the 23rd at 415 West Broadway.
“The deep sea, the most mysterious portion of the planet earth, is actually full of light. The light is not sunlight coming down from the surface, but rather is produced by a wide variety of creatures that live there. Where else could you find both mammals and fish co-inhabiting in one massive living space? What measures do they take to survive? How do they evolve in such a harsh environment? Where do they originate from? I dove into the primordial sea with these questions and studied our most ancient unicellular ancestors as I was making the Deep Sea Series.” - Sky Kim
Kim is mesmerized by the thousands of jellyfish species which we know so little about. Both the graceful ballerina-like movements and the fluidity of their bodies inspire her compositions. She is intrigued by the ways in which they use light to communicate with each other, to attract prey, or to distract their predators while they escape. The jellyfish has a kind of superpower according to Kim; its bioluminescence led to one of modern medicine’s most important tools. The green fluorescent protein gene (GFP) can be used as a marker, a highlighter that you can use in a medical or scientific lab. The protein is naturally expressed in the North American jellyfish Aequorea victoria, and works by absorbing energy from blue light in the environment and emitting a green glow in response. Kim illustrates these blue and green lights in the series; sometimes they are like laser beams, while at other times they are scattered like stardust.
Other motifs include images of seahorses and their close relatives, sea dragons, the multi-tentacled octopus, a vibrant yellow keyhole (representing portals to other worlds), and buddhas, many with a signature mandala shape. A monumental, 100-inch long painting titled “Lost Civilization: Underwater Pyramid” explores the tales and myths of prehistoric lost civilizations. The image of a submerged rock from the Atlantis continent, a self-glowing underwater pyramid, and a statue of a still vibrant Buddha in the series are part of Kim’s endless quest to discover and record our lost past.
