Eunice Kim's Universal Prints

South Korea’s Eunice Kim creates minimal images that transcend forms and bisected shapes to describe universal messages and symbols of a microbial biomorphic world. Her images of circles and ovals, sometimes cross-cut and overlapped, look like things we would find in a petri dish or under a microscope. Yet, there is a flat, symbolic reference to the circle, the rejuvenation of life, or the cycles of Nature that come ‘round to remind us life goes onward.

Kim’s work is pretty straightforward, using singular black ink with warm toned paper, and despite the formality of the work, the viewer’s engagement with it is personal. Additionally, these images could easily translate to a grander scale, but they are just as effective on the intimate scale she chooses for us to see.

The artist uses tessellated tiles in some of her newer series. As defined in the dictionary, a tessellation is the tiling of a plane using one or more geometric shapes, with no overlaps or gaps. In mathematics, tessellations can be generalized to higher dimensions and a variety of geometries. It can have a repeating pattern. Historically, tessellations were used in Ancient Rome and in Islamic art such as in the decorative tiling of the Alhambra palace. The work of M. C. Escher often used tessellations for artistic effect. Tessellations are also sometimes used for decorative effect in quilting.

Kim’s images use the tessellation loosely, and there is a broken effect of her circles being fragmented and collaged together again. They feel like people passing each other in a crowded termination at the airport, or on the subway train. They appear as ghosts of faces that pass before us as we rush on with our day. We can retain only a fragmentary portion of what we see. The memories of those faces will have to suffice as we proceed with our lives. Kim currently lives and works in the Seattle, Washington area.

Education:
San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA
California State University Long Beach, CA

Awards:
Puffin Foundation West Grant, Puffin Foundation West, Columbus, OH
Tacoma Arts Commission, City of Tacoma, WA
Guanlan International Print Biennial, Guanlan Art Museum, Shenzhen, China
Frans Masereel Center, Kasterlee, Belgium
Individual Artist Grant, Arts Council for Long Beach, Long Beach, CA
Fellowship Award, Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA

Public Collections:
Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, AR
California State University, Long Beach, CA
Frans Masereel Center, Kasterlee, Belgium
Guanlan Original Printmaking Base, Shenzhen, China
Kala Art Institute Print Archive, Berkeley, CA
Kohler Art Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI
Museum of Contemporary Graphic Arts, Cairo, Egypt
National Library of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain
Southern Graphics Council Print Collection and Archives, Oxford, MA