'The life of an artist is so … starving," says Young Ji Kim.
Young Ji & Auralie, 2015
She always knew she would become an artist. In high school in South Korea, she was following the science track. She got down on her knees, sometime before her final year of high school, to beg her father to let her go to an art school for university. He hesitated. Then he told her to go to the best one. Her sister was a nurse for the military; her father, a small business owner. The path of an artist is risky.
Her father applied for his first passport to fly to Bangkok for the opening of her first solo show, "Truthful Energy", at Chamchuri Art Gallery last week.
At 7pm, the crowd gathers in the gallery as Kim and her swing dancing crew break into a shim sham dance routine. Many of the faces are recognisable. They are in Kim's paintings. They are smiling. It feels as though the swirls in her works have escaped the canvas and seeped onto the makeshift dance floor. The dance floor is the origin of her works, she says.
David, 2015.
Kim knows her subjects well, their characters, their smiles, things that tickles them, things that make them seethe. She sees their true colours. Before creating the paintings, she meditates.
"Each painting must be done in one breath," she says. "I can't stop." She speaks of the vibrant backgrounds of each piece, which captures the essence of her friends in brush strokes, calm like lake water or energetic like a gust of wind, blue and mysterious or effervescent like bubblegum's pop. She listened to different types of music while she painted, absorbing the tempo.
Kim met these characters when she moved to Bangkok in 2012. When she completed her undergrad as an art student, she was battling against doing what all her friends ended up doing: teaching painting.
"You can easily make money that way; there are many exams in Korea," she says. She had missed teacher training courses in college because she was in the school rock band. She started swing dancing when she was in her last year of university.
"One day, my friends in the band who I was always hanging out with disappeared. I called them and they said they were swing dancing. Someone said he was looking for a girlfriend."
She remembers walking into the dark basement and through curtains that opened up onto a glittering dance floor. It was like trying a drug for the first time, she says. She's been hooked since. Her craft has been shaped by dancing — the movements, the energy. It is where she relaxes, stops thinking and begins focusing on fleeting moments and on the people she's dancing with.
It was also in college that she realised: "Maybe I could do this [make art] till I die." Her teacher had told her less than 5% of the 90 students would make it as an artist. She wanted to be in that 5%. She remembers, in high school, a compliment from her classmate that made her decide to pursue her path.
Malee, 2015.
"In Korea, people never give compliments. If they like the shirt you're wearing, they might say something like, 'Is that a new shirt?'."
Kim wanted to continue with graduate school but she accidentally applied to the wrong programme, a night school.
"It must have not meant to be," she concedes. Hyperrealism was very popular among her classmates at the time, but Kim was always painting something else. "I wanted to do something more fun. There were times when I thought maybe I was too positive," she says. She didn't want to paint about politics. She did end up teaching at a private tutoring school and making enough money to finally go to graduate school the following year.
She worked at a coffee shop throughout graduate school, washing dishes, watching people, reading for her thesis work.
"By the time I graduated, my mentality was that I had to be ready to be hungry," she says.
"One night, I was shopping online after working on my thesis. The website I liked was looking for a model so I decided to apply," she says. She became a model for six months until she was asked to pose in a bikini. "I was suddenly very shy! I was so shocked at myself that I actually cared. I didn't know," she says. She quit. Before she moved to Thailand, Kim had pictured massage shops under trees. When she visited for the first time, she went on a trip to Wang Nam Khiao. She had never seen that many stars, and thought the trees in Korea were much smaller. When she packed up her things and moved here, her boyfriend helped her get settled. Her swing dance community became her family.
Kim has also created fibreglass sculptures for the show, venturing from her usual 2D paintings. She lived alone in Seoul and had plants in her room and studio.
"I think plants can absorb my energies. They're healthier when I'm happy," she says. The sculptures, inspired by the works of artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, mimic the curves of the human form suspended in a dance move.
"Truthful Energy" is on show at Chamchuri Art Gallery, Chulalongkorn University, until April 19.
