Justin N. Kim
Justin N. Kim meticulously paints his “Map” painting series
I paint gridded environments that acknowledge everyday human encounters and elements from visual culture. Concepts and designs derived from architectonics, cartography, fashion, and technology, as well as machinery and weightlifting depend on underlying systems of order and structure; each functions within a dedicated set of rules to establish a sense of logic and order.
In my paintings, I re-contextualize the visual elements drawn from these subjects and from quotidian human encounters, and I reconstruct and reorganize them. Comprised of lines and shapes, the colorful, geometric compositions undergo a countless procedure of create-and-destroy, resulting in a cause-and-effect phenomenon; each layer interacts and communicates with the others, creating its own set of parameters. As a whole, the components function as an autonomous ecosystem that maintains a certain order and structure within each painting.