Mie Yim

Over the past 10-15 years Korean-born, New York-based artist Mie Yim’s artistic practice has embraced a dance of figuration and abstraction. The invented pastoral settings and anthropomorphic animals that used to define her paintings shifted into a strange blend of organic/biomorphic machine like beings, using intuitive sources and drawing on influences from art and life. Still, there is an underlying sense and thematic representation of bunny ears, doe eyes, buried beneath. In her recent work, a strong tension exists between recognizable images and mutating forms with thick surfaces that resonate more with abstraction. The juxtaposition of saturated colors and dramatic content is a reoccurring feature of the artist’s notion of beauty – which is almost always accompanied by an underlying sense of horror. Her pictorial imagination includes natural deities, parasites, characters consumed by vegetal forms, animated compositions floating in space. Yim’s subjects are hazy and fuzzy like her fragmented memory of childhood; caused by hasty migration to the U.S. at a young age.

Yim has had a number of solo exhibitions including Olympia Gallery, The Chashama space at the Durst foundation, Ground floor Gallery, Lehmann Maupin, Michael Steinberg,Gallery all in New York, NY. Also at In Arco, Turin, Italy. Numerous group exhibitions include the Drawing Center, Feature, Ise Cultural Foundation, Mitchell Algus Gallery, BRIC art center, Mark Borghi Gallery, all NYC. Other places such as Johnson County Community College, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta, The Arts Center at Western Conn. University. She is a recipient of Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant in 2020, The Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant 2018, The New York Foundation of the Arts Painting Fellowship 2015 and Artist in the Market Place, Bronx Museum. She has a BFA in Painting from Philadelphia College of Art as well as a year abroad at Tyler School of Art in Rome, Italy. Yim was born in S. Korea, she’s based in New York. She currently has a solo exhibition at Villa Magdalena in Donostia - San Sebastian, Spain.