Sweet in color and pungent in its forms, Mie Yim’s art is filled with contradictions. One of its sources is suggested by the statement of its artist:
When I work, I start from an emotional space of the past, my childhood years. The abrupt migration from Korea to Hawaii when I was a young girl left an indelible impression of disconnection and nostalgia. Making art is a way to reconstruct some kind of meaning and purpose of a fragmented identity […].
After meeting his work on Instagram, I saw him for the first time in person in his personal exhibition Psychotropic Dance: Mie Yim in Olympia in January 2021, six months after the start of the pandemic and Governor Cuomo’s shutdown of New York State. Working in pastel on handmade sheets of colored paper, Yim is collectively titled Quarantine drawings and the oil paintings were unlike anything I had seen. It was like discovering an unknown country that had been there from the start.
This is how I described this country in my review a spectacle :
Imagine an ever-changing amalgamation of floral shapes, fuzzy stuffed animal shapes, spiky viruses, googly eyes, teeth, volumetric shapes, and patterns, and you’ll begin to get an idea of what I consider like Yim’s daily drawing practice. In each pastel…drawing, she seems to start over, without ever trying to make a variation on a theme. She works on backgrounds of different colors and changes palette with each drawing. The feeling is one of improvisation and impulse guided by years of devotion to drawing.
I was curious how the drawings became paintings, as the two paintings in the exhibit didn’t indicate what she was doing. Rather than satisfying me – as the Quarantine drawings — the painting made me want to see more, which is a good thing.
It led me to see Mie Yim: Nightshadehis first exhibition at the Simone Subal Gallery (April 14-May 20, 2023), which consists of 10 oil paintings of various sizes in the front gallery (all dated 2023) and a selection of works on paper on the back, dating from 2004 to 2022. This terrific pairing showed different paths that Yim had explored in his drawings and paintings, spanning representation and abstraction.
An untitled linear ink drawing from 2005 depicts an angled view of children’s teddy bears huddled under a mushroom hat, reminiscent of Mayan mushroom carvings and the civilization’s use of mind-altering drugs. By bringing together a hallucinogenic mushroom and a childhood toy, often understood as both a companion and an alter ego, Yim suggests that we might see his work as an altered state in which all sorts of memories and visions blend together to become something unexpected, unspeakable and not necessarily benign.
Among the many qualities that Yim honed while working in pastel – which successfully transfers to his oil paintings – are the blending of colors and the softening of forms. She can get a rich, dusty color or juxtapose hard-edged shapes with others that look blurry and slightly out of focus. His learned ability to capture several different effects in a single painting sets his work apart from that of many other artists who use oil paint. Another strength is its ability to suggest that a form is alive. Once this animism is noticeable, as in the eye in the upper left corner of “Family Jewels” (2023), it becomes apparent throughout his work. What are the interactions between the organic and the inorganic? What can we do with shapes that look like enlarged versions of microscopic things? The work derives some of its power from the instability of not knowing exactly what ground you are standing on when looking at it. Using oil paint as if it were both dust and liquid, and softening the shapes to suggest a recessed space, Yim draws the viewer into all sorts of inexplicable situations, where danger may or may not lurk. . I wonder if that sense of insecurity is what she felt when her family moved from Korea to Hawaii and she began to live in a world where few people shared her language.
This uncertainty is at the heart of Yim’s art. With its long, thread-like red tresses, the one-eyed creature from “Howl” (2023) is essentially unreadable. Is it friendly or treacherous? Yet the artist thwarts terror with his colors and the evocation of soft forms. His use of color, which is only mentioned in the Quarantine drawings, is honored in this exhibition. Purple dominates in “Sheep Wolf” (2023), which I consider his re-vision of Jackson Pollock’s “The She-Wolf” (1943). According to Roman mythology, a she-wolf nursed the twins Romulus and Remus. Later, during an argument, Romulus killed Remus and founded Rome. In ancient Rome, purple denoted someone’s status as royalty, suggesting that the wolf is the royalty in the painting, not the twins. At the same time, it is unknown whether the creature is friendly or fierce. This is what makes the paintings so strong. Just as they hold our attention with their fusion of color and form, we wonder about their meaning.
Mie Yim: Nightshade continues at Simone Subal Gallery (131 Bowery, 2nd Floor, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through May 20. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
