Mie Yim has had a number of solo exhibitions including The Chashama space at the Durst foundation in New York, NY, Ground floor Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, Lehmann Maupin, NY, Michael Steinberg, NY, Gallery 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 in New York.  Other venues include- 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. 

QUESTION:

I’ve been following your work for many years and am interested in the shifts in your imagery. In the early 200’s your work was figurative and narrative. I’ve watched it morph to work that contained elements of figuration to being completely abstract. Your latest work, I think made during the covid months, has been a fascinating synthesis of figuration, abstraction and what look almost like scientific drawings. Could you speak to the dance that your work does between these various forms?

ANSWER:

Ah, the dance.  It’s been happening as long as I can remember.  Believe it or not, I was doing very abstract work before I was doing my characters in 2003-4, so the history is abstract- figuration- abstract- to the present time; which is the synchronized dance of abstract and figuration in an amalgamated imagery.   

To start, my inspiration was from the ab-ex guys.  I was doing huge oil on canvas, not particularly inventive.  I was in the searching mode.  The male professor whispered in my ear, “you should think about your identity.  You are Asian, you are a woman.”  I was shocked and appalled.  First of all, I really was not aware of my Asianess.  I thought, like life, as I had come to the U.S. as an immigrant, assimilation was my best strategy.  I did things like change my name when I was F.O.B.(fresh of the boat) to Jennifer, thinking that that would help me be more western.  I wanted to blend in.  After the teachers remark, the nagging voice started to question, why am I not addressing my identity?  Why not draw from my culture? So the investigation of selfhood pivoted to figuration.  It was the most illustrative way of showing, hey, look at my fluffy cute bears and bunnies.  

They are from my cultural heritage.  I can make a unique world here that’s my own.  I walked as far away from DeKooning as possible.  My career took off at this time, maybe I should’ve stuck with it (lol) but pretty quickly it started to feel limiting.  Making the figure in a narrative situation creates more of a psychological game, in which I felt it was like playing tricks.   

The emotive level was more on the surface, more cerebral.  I wanted to go deeper.  To me, the abstraction does that.   

I did one painting at that time where the figures were literarily getting devoured by one giant figure.  They were going underneath.  From 2009-2015 I was happily making abstract paintings, with signs of figuration.  Year 2016-17 they became more and more abstract, where the figures were disappearing. Then what happens?   I miss the figures.  So again, the pivot occurs.  

The eyeballs return, shiny nose is there as well as horizontal bands, colorful dots, fuzzy contours.   

And now since Covid shut down, I’ve been making the drawings you’re referring to.  I’m almost done (want to do 100) They possess everything I’ve been wanting to do.  My problem, if you could call it that, is that I wanted to make artwork in different ways, and rather then doing it one way at a time, I had to find a way to do many ways at a time, in one imagery.  So it only took me five hundred years to figure it out, but hey, who’s counting?  After all, I’m still dancing.