Heins Kim is an artist from Los Angeles who lives and works in New York. Kim was born and raised in Southern California to Korean-immigrant parents who were from Germany. As a result the artist’s work turns briefly to tradition in order to transgress boundaries, breaking down cultural barriers and question old forms in order to generate new sets of inferences.

Kim approaches painting from two different angles. The texture of abstraction has pulled him into the genre where this desire is made manifest in a series of paintings titled Guilty Pleasures. Diptych-Red #010 satisfies the implicit allure at a complex, painterly surface. The artist’s Penance-series, however, is performed as a responsive act of contrition. Upon these etched aluminum surfaces, Heins Kim methodically scribes a redundant motif to prove that the process of representation is not a lenient task.

Heins Kim also salvages broken objects that have been discarded toward reassembly into a renewed and superceded order. Good Fortune Cat and Vintage Hula Girlpiece together iconic symbols of ethnic kitsch into worthy relics, channeling digressive cultural norms that echo the empty desires which shift around mundane found objects. Kim is currently reconfiguring a Willy’s MDA (M170) ambulance jeep as a critique upon the Post Korean War era.

In the summer of 2008 the artist collaborated with Dianne Bowen for Wire Tap, an exhibition of new work that explored the complexities of global communication. In the Fall 2011, Kim’s art appeared in Data-In, Data Out at the Walsh Gallery in South Orange, New Jersey.

Contact Kim via email, heinskim [at] gmail [dot] com