Hyesu Kim

Based in London and Singapore, Hyesu creates artworks with a cartoonish style that reflects and is inspired by the waves of emotional frustration, fatigue and lethargy in her mundane life, experiencing the pandemic in Singapore and as a stranger and newcomer to London. As a result, her multiple emotional faces lie within and penetrate every corner of her art practice. 

The art subjects in her body of work have a kind of whimsical, cynical or sometimes weird character and appearance, with cheeky smiles and gestures.  In particular, her work “Good Night" (2022) is not only visually eye-catching in a strange way, but also evokes her deep and painful lonely isolation throughout her pandemic experience in Singapore. 

In this artwork, Hyesu portrays herself as a giant bug, lying in bed motionless, simply staying alive by just breathing.  But her multiple faces also reflect her or our multiple emotions of frustration, fatigue, dull, curiosity or sometimes happiness and excitement as we deal with our quotidian lives.  After her experience of quarantine in such a strange place, she quietly but cynically tells the story of her mind and emotion on canvas.

She says,“My work explores the uneasy emotions that I experience through the intuitiveness of drawing. The drawings reveal my subconscious mind in everyday encounters, especially those very personal and comparatively trivial moments. These emotions, difficult and conflicting but also helpless and bottomless, encompass a range of states such as unease, loneliness, shame and lethargy."

In her drawings, she employs various media including ink, carbon pencil, pastels and oil paints and then mutates these drawings into moving images as a form of media art. Her use of humour is a strategy to disarm the audience and lure them softly into her art world, which describes rather brutal, uncanny and peculiar images of human emotion. 

Hyesu’s London debut will be at Gallery M Platform’s September group exhibition in 2022.  This debut will lead her on to a new and confident career path. She now lives and works in London.