Statement/ 2025.07.15 / Luna Kim

Luna Kim expresses the refined yet alienated process of natural human thought through expressionist painting. For Kim, “expressionism” is a kind of cliché—referring to habitual, codified brushwork. She distinguishes between the rational, socialized human being and the repressed, instinctual self.(1) The former leads to mannered expression; the latter, to sincere expression. In this framework, she reverses the conventional hierarchy between painting and drawing. Though painting is her primary medium, she considers drawing to hold greater authenticity and uses it as a foundational guide in her practice. Like many thinkers before her, Kim recognizes that the two poles of this binary cannot exist without one another. Her privileging of drawing and simultaneous commitment to painting, her critique of expressionism and her making of expressionist works—these contradictions reflect her pursuit of an impossible state: to maintain human freedom without discarding reason.

What matters most in her practice, then, is this contradictory stance and its orientation toward the impossible, and she explores this through a range of themes. Her starting point, back in 2019, was distorted images of the human body that emerged from a climate of anxiety. In seeking to express these, she began incorporating bodily movement into her work, emphasizing gesture in brushstrokes. Naturally, she became drawn to expressionist painting, which she saw as a means of representing the formless.

Her interest in expressionism evolved into a questioning and investigation of whether it could truly serve as a language for the invisible. This led her to abstraction, where gesture plays a central role. From 2021 through the present (2025), Kim’s abstract paintings—with no fixed forms—have taken shape through experiments with automatist drawing. Inspired by music, dance, and image collections, she creates these drawings without looking at the surface, relying instead on the sensation in her hands. These become repositories of truth—expressions stripped of ego. In the process of translating these into paintings, mannered brushstrokes—absent in the original drawings—reappear. But rather than diminishing authenticity, they serve to shatter illusion and recover reason.

What began as a figure representing anxiety became, by 2021, a symbolic metaphor for painting itself. The human figure in her figurative works—like the emotionally charged automata in Balthus’s paintings—becomes a “living inanimate,” revealing the contradiction at the heart of her expressionist approach.

After a hiatus in 2022, her landscape series began in 2023. These are not depictions of “pure” nature, but of nature shaped and managed by humans. The kind of nature one encounters while traveling is already touched by human hands—closer to controlled wilderness than untouched reality. By working with these directly experienced subjects, Kim examines the impossibility of truthful expression under the pretense of translating bodily traces onto the canvas.

This line of inquiry is even more explicitly explored in her recent mythology series, begun in 2025. Based on a myth she created herself, these works present a dualism of human and nature, reason and animality—reimagined as wild beasts versus birds of flight, language versus silence. In this series, each painting functions as both a visual summary of a chapter and a vessel of the overarching narrative’s worldview.

Luna Kim does not confine herself to any one subject; rather, she searches for subjects that can embody her attitude—especially those that allow her to probe contradiction with persistence. Her interest in the paradoxes of expressionist painting reflects a broader concern with the dual nature of humanity and its own creations—namely, society.

As a result, her paintings reveal the coexistence of smooth, confident brushstrokes with rough, scratched, and rubbed textures. These marks sometimes form abstractions, other times become subordinated to representational forms. Her use of intense color symbolizes the uncontrollable animality of humans, yet when these colors are harnessed within figuration, they suggest an effort to reconcile the rational and the instinctual.