GOOD JOB WELL DONE
Bonam Kim

GALLERY I

February 11–March 12, 2023

Opening reception: Saturday, February 11 from 6–8pm

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce GOOD JOB WELL DONE, an exhibition of sculptures by New York Member Bonam Kim.

Kim grew up with her brother’s architectural models and drawings scattered around their house. Captivated by the relationship between model and actual space, she gained an acute sense of her spatial surroundings. This sensibility, combined with her love of making things with her hands, led her to constructing miniatures of her world. These objects invite us to navigate not only the spaces she has occupied physically, but also the psychological space of her experiences and memories. By manipulating scale and taking a bird’s-eye view perspective, Kim reclaims power over the past and present. Works like Between Dream and Dark and Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down playfully explore the frustrations of cross-cultural exchange, while Untitled (April 2, 2020) and Untitled (203 Harrison Pl) evince feelings of isolation and accumulation during the pandemic era. 

In Untitled (Classroom), Kim recreates a typical classroom from memory. Within it she presents us with some of the artifacts of the post-war South Korean educational system: politely folded hands are given a “stamp of approval” on the blackboard, commended for their conformity. Kim continues this examination of the way architectural spaces regulate human behavior in Untitled (401 Suydam Street), a model of the artist’s bedroom. She restages an event in which her apartment’s ceiling had become infested by pigeons, eroding her sense of personal space and producing an uneasy awareness of surveillance—of being observed at her most intimate by an other. 

Untitled (1990-2005) contends with a traumatizing childhood experience where Kim suffered a severe hand burn which led her to have multiple surgeries over an extended period of time. These memories led her to grow averse to going into spaces that brought forth memories of the hospital’s formal qualities, such as hair salons. With the piece she distills the relation between time, space, and memory, turning a wall clock into an operating room and hair salon. This sense of spatial unease is echoed in the piece Untitled (Mexico City-Seoul), which models the circumstances of renewing her visa in the middle of the 2020 pandemic. Having to ping-pong between Mexico and Seoul without knowing when she would be able to return to the United States made her reflect on the arbitrariness of the system, which is mirrored in the piece by an embassy office held within a lottery box, pointing to a bureaucratic opacity that leaves the user in a sort of Kafkaesque limbo. 

Bonam Kim is a sculptor based in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA and MFA degree from Hong-ik University in Seoul, South Korea. In 2016, she completed her second MFA in sculpture from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. She was featured as an emerging artist from DongBangYoGae in Art in Culture magazine, published in Seoul, South Korea. She was also awarded the Stutzman Family Foundation Graduate Fellowship for her residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. She has completed a three-month residency at NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, NY and the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY. She has exhibited work at NARS Foundation, Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York, SOHO 20, The Korean Cultural Center, Super Dutchess Gallery, and Denise Bibro Fine Art, among others. 

View the Press Release here.

View Bonam Kim’s page here.

Recent Press: Katelynn Dunn, “Bonam Kim’s Good Job Well Done at A.I.R. Gallery,” https://www.katelynndunn.com/bonam-kims-good-job-well-done

Photography: Matthew Sherman