I Feel Light, Finally
Bonam Kim
GALLERY I
Bonam Kim, Untitled (Good Luck), 2024, dartboard, metal, 3D-printed figure, resin, 17 3/4 x 17 3/4 x 5 1/2 inches.
April 26 – May 25, 2025
Opening reception: Saturday, April 26, from 6–8pm
A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce I Feel Light, Finally, an exhibition of new sculptures by A.I.R New York Artist Bonam Kim. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition at A.I.R.
Bonam Kim translates personal experiences into intimate-scale narratives, crafting architectural models, dollhouse miniatures, and analog games that invite viewers into her psychological landscapes. Through the act of scaling down, she transforms complex emotions—anxiety, frustration, nostalgia—into manageable, tangible forms. In this exhibition, she explores how external structures shape personal identity, from public and institutional spaces to the private realm of home.
In works such as Untitled (Our Bright Future), Untitled (Good Luck), and Untitled (March 14, 2024), Kim reflects on the pressures and uncertainties of navigating the world as a student, an emerging artist, a migrant, and a New Yorker. Untitled (Our Bright Future) revisits Kim’s rigorous art school training in Korea, where creative expression was often overshadowed by rote exercises in classical Western forms. By reimagining the classroom setting that once served as a gateway to university, she critically examines the interplay between cultural assimilation and creative expression at the heart of modern South Korean art education. In Untitled (Good Luck), she humorously captures the contemporary art world’s unpredictability by transforming herself into a dart pin, playfully depicting the process of applying for numerous opportunities and waiting outcomes as a game of chance rather than merit. Positioned in the broader context in which Kim lives and works, Untitled (March 14, 2024) responds to the increasing sense of insecurity on New York’s public transit system, particularly after a subway shooting in 2024. Reimagining subway seats as cell phone storage lockers, she encapsulates the emotional weight of living in an environment where safety feels increasingly precarious. By highlighting the intersection between public infrastructure and personal vulnerability, Kim transforms systemic dynamics into an intimate experience of insecurity and apprehension.
By contrast, Untitled (2019–2024), Untitled (Home Alone), and ___ Years Well Being delve into Kim’s relationship with home, solitude, and belonging. Untitled (2019–2024) contemplates the unattainability of stable housing in New York City by transforming a chair—a fundamental space of rest—into an anti-utilitarian architectural form. In Untitled (Home Alone), Kim recreates miniature rooms from her current home, featuring halved furniture as a metaphor for the fragmentation and isolation she experiences in intimate relationships, particularly as an immigrant navigating cultural and linguistic barriers. In ___ Years Well Being, she reflects on the care packages her mother has sent from Seoul, pressing dried plants and mushrooms into clay and casting them in plaster. By juxtaposing scientific classification with personal storytelling, she captures the duality of longing and connection that defines her experience of living abroad.
Through these works, Kim maps the emotional and physical landscapes she inhabits, using scale, structure, and materiality to process the forces that shape her reality. Whether confronting the systemic pressures of education and career or reflecting on the meaning of home, she distills deeply personal narratives into sculptural forms that invite both introspection and empathy, ultimately reconfiguring external pressures into intimate dialogues of self-discovery and personal resilience.
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, Art in Culture magazine in Seoul, South Korea. Also, she has been 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 A.I.R. Gallery, NARS Foundation, Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York, SOHO 20, The Korean Cultural Center, Super Dutchess Gallery, Denise Bibro Fine Art, among others.
View Bonam Kim’s page here.
View the Press Release here.