Sky Kim

Key Hole

2018

New York-based artist Sky Kim (b. Seoul, South Korea) is known for her meticulously patterned, incantatory watercolors. Her paintings operate as optical illusions inviting the viewer into a meditative state of increased self-awareness and tranquility. Kim creates work from a place of stillness with meditation as her guide. “I have to raise my vibrations to the highest level,” she says of her process. “I put myself in that state so that I am very close to my highest self.” From this place, she creates a complexity of repetitive patterns that appear to undulate and pulse if the viewer stares at them long enough. In her words, “a lot of my viewers experience some kind of energy coming from the center of my work. They feel vibrations.” Themes of reincarnation and ritual are prevalent in her work. Through the act of gazing, she attempts to reconnect her viewers to their sense of blank slate perfection, something that, according to the philosophy of reincarnation, we lose after we’re born. She speaks of one clean, unbroken human energy that emanates from this place of oneness. “I want them to realize that we are all together. One big tapestry.” She also draws inspiration from sacred geometry (an ancient and spiritual mathematical language that undergirds certain aesthetics in nature and its development), because she believes that humans are ever-evolving; our lives and self-hoods expanding outwards, like the universe, rather than in a traditionally linear fashion. The ancient principles of sacred geometry, its logarithms and designs, help her to consider who we are as humans, and what we’re about - an essential inquiry at the heart of her work. Born in Seoul, Korea, Kim 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.