WOOMIN KIM

Woomin Kim is a Korean artist currently based in Queens, NY. Through her textile and sculptural projects, she examines the pre-existing narratives of urban landscapes and immigrant life offering her own version that feels more personal and accurate. Kim has participated in exhibitions and residencies at the Bronx Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Noguchi Museum, Art Omi, Queens Museum, and the Wassaic Project. She has received fellowships and awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Noguchi Museum and Bronx Museum. Her works have been featured in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Juxtapoz and BOMB Magazine. Kim received her B.F.A from Seoul National University and M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Hi Woomin! Thanks for joining me for Mint Tea. To begin, what’s your favorite tea? If you don’t drink tea, what kind of coffee or drink do you enjoy the most?

I'm a heavy, heavy coffee drinker. I actually don't make it, but my husband, every morning before he goes to work, he makes a whole pot of coffee and I drink it all day. I try not to drink coffee too much, so I really limit myself to two, three cups of coffee. As I drink it, the coffee goes down and then I keep pouring hot water, until it just becomes almost completely hot water. That's kind of my tea and coffee. I'm not like picky, like I don't have sensitive tastes. I just drink anything as long as it's not too sour. At some point, my father in law bought us this serious coffee machine called a moka machine. I don't even know how it works, but it makes such great drip coffee. I'm not particular at all.

I miss bori-cha though. Do you know this orange juice that used to be in this big glass jar, Del Monte orange juice? They used to sell juice in this gigantic glass bottle, and my grandma always used to keep bori-cha in there, cold, in the fridge. I miss it so much. For some reason, I felt like it tasted different because of the jar, almost. It’s something very nostalgic, and I don't think they make the juice in the glass jar anymore. But yeah, I miss bori-cha. Whenever I go to Korea I drink a lot of bori-cha. Sometimes I go to H Mart or some Korean supermarket and they sell it as a tea bag, but my mom has some serious tea boiling machine that she bought because she wanted to boil some dried mushroom as a medicine. So she bought this super serious tea maker, and sometimes she makes bori-cha with that. That's what I drink in Korea.

Could you tell me about your background and your practice?

I'm from Korea, and I came to the US ten years ago to study in grad school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I was in Chicago for three years for school and then I stayed a little longer. Then I went to Boston for a couple years, and then I came to New York. Now I'm based in Queens. The focus in both my undergrad and grad school was in the sculpture department. I went to the sculpture department because at both of the schools, they were the departments that were open to any kind of material. When I came to SAIC, they were basically open to anything – there were even people who were making film. SAIC has a very open concept of departments. The sculpture department was close to the woodshop, and they had a lot of studios that were more messy, so that's kind of why I chose sculpture. I made a lot of 3-D works then, and now my works are more focused on quilting, textile, and embroideries.

I changed my subject a lot, I think because people's interests change organically throughout somebody's life. But talking about my recent couple of years of work, I'm making a lot of landscapes and sceneries of two cities that I think of as home, Seoul and Queens. So in 2020 and 2021, I focused on making this shijang project, which means street markets in Korean. I made a lot of stores and sceneries of shijang, like a fish market and a shoe market. Shijang is such an amalgamation of all different kinds of objects and stores and energies, so I was trying to describe that using fabrics. Recently I'm also making a lot of quilts that are not too specific to this market environment, but more like golmok, which means a small road in a small town in Korea, or the Queens landscape, like general stores on Myrtle Avenue, which is the street just around the corner from me. Also I'm making some random objects that I see on my walk. I'm trying to walk these days because I really need exercise and walking is the easiest exercise I can do. So whenever I go for a walk, I like looking at objects on the ground, so I take photos of them and I make them. So it's like a quilt that looks like asphalt, and then there's objects on it. So I'm making a lot of surroundings from Queens and Korea.

What projects are you working on right now?

I temporarily went back to the shijang project, because I showed it again in January and I wanted to create this installation that was more like a full, hanging shijang vibe, and this exhibition gave me the opportunity to actually install, not on the wall, but hanging in the middle of the spaces like a banner almost. When I was making shijang, I knew I wanted to make a fish market, and shoe stores, and hardware stores, and general stores. But there were some stores that are definitely a big part of shijang, but I kind of avoided, like the silk fabric store that makes hanbok. You always see that in shijang, but I don't know why, I thought, “Oh, this might be a bit too obviously Korean, and I want  it to look more like universal.” But at this point, I'm like, “Why do I avoid it?” It's a part of shijang, and I like it, it's so pretty. I just felt unapologetic about it, so I was like, this is a good chance to make some additions to the shijang that I skipped for some reason.

I am the most familiar with your quilted textile works. Can you talk about how and why you choose to work with the media that you do?

So as I said briefly, I always had such a love of fabric. Fabric is such a magical material, whatever kind it is, so I just always loved that. And then, for some reason, I think I kind of postponed being fully devoted to fabric in my art practice. Now that I think about it, it's kind of like when you are having a meal, and there's a whole set of banchan, I always find myself avoiding some banchan that I really like until the end, because I'm like, “I'm gonna have this really like good bite, when I'm ready.” I don't know – I’m weird that way. I feel like working with fabric, I always knew that I love fabric, and I knew if I'm devoted to it, I'm just going to be devoted to it. So I was skirting around it a little bit. I was working with different material, and I wanted to expand my horizon, or whatever, when I was a student. And then at some point, you can't avoid it anymore, you just end up at admitting that you love fabric.

It was at the beginning of 2020 that I actually really fully worked with fabric, and it kind of worked out perfectly, because my studio shut down. I had a studio at the Queens Museum at the time, and it was a really great studio, but then because of COVID they shut down. Then I was just at home, and I was thinking, “Oh, now I'm gonna practice sewing and quilting,” because this is something I wanted to do for a long time. I always wanted to work on something with shijang because that's the place that I liked the most in Korea. I always go there whenever I visit Korea. And so I decided: without thinking, I'm going to make something about it. I took a lot of photos of shijang whenever I visited Korea, so I had thousands of photos of shijang. I thought maybe I will make the items of shijang, like fish, without thinking it's going to end up as quilt. I was making these small appliqué objects, and then at some point, I thought, I'm going to make banners, big tapestry looking banners, because that's what I see in shijang. Shijang are covered with fabric too, because they have this temporary roofing, and they have some celebration banners or advertisement banners, for example. And so I was like, “Why don't I just make them as a fabric installation?” Also, that was the time when there was a super xenophobic attitude towards Asians, and especially Asian markets, because people were like, “Oh, COVID started from an Asian market!” That kind of horror story was going around in the US, and Chinatown Asian markets were the first stores that were shutting down, and people really had this xenophobic narrative about the street market. So I really wanted to create this narrative of the street market in a way that I know. It's a very celebratory, energetic, vibrant place, not mysterious, dangerous place like in a Western narrative. So everything kind of worked together at the time.

When and how did you begin working with embroidery and quilting?

Embroidery and fabric was always somehow part of my work. Even when I was working with sculpture, there was some idea of weaving and sewing, even when it was sculptural installation. And as I said, my fabric is a very physical material, so whenever I think about some project and think about the proper material, oftentimes the proper method of making something or installing something is borrowed from textile methods like weaving, or sometimes sewing makes the most sense instead of gluing or screwing. So it's always been part of my work.

What is your creative process like? Do you start your work with a specific concept in mind from the beginning or does it evolve organically as you go?

It's mixed. So I have some core idea, for example, I'm going to make a shijang. I started with appliqués. That was the beginning of the work. I didn't have a full plan of, “Oh, this is gonna end up the size of a quilt.” I figured it out as I went. I had a bunch of appliqué, for example, the fish market was one of the first ones, and I made a bunch of fish appliqués. It was just lying on my desk, and I was like, “Oh, this can be just sewn into a background that's going to look like a whole textile,” and then I started sketching what it was going to look like. So it's a mixture of some core idea and then figuring out in the process.

What inspires the images behind your work?

My phone photos. I really take a lot of phone photos. And more than half of them, if I scroll through and look at it later, I'm like, “What is this? Why did I even take this photo?” So I think it really tells what I'm paying attention to in my daily life, and it inspires me. What kinds of scenery and what kinds of objects do I respond to in my daily life? So I really rely on my phone. I scroll down and look at it once a while and think. Like, at some point I was making this “Pipe Dream” series, which is sculptural, it's the image of pipes that I make with aluminum mesh. I started working with it because my phone was filled with photos of pipes, so I was thinking about it. And like I said, at some point I had thousands of shijang photos. And at some point, I was just taking photos of trash or objects on the ground, and I was thinking about it.

You must have a large collection of fabric that you pull from to create your work. How do you decide which patterns, colors, and textures get added to your collection? Is there a type of fabric that you especially like?

I love upholstery fabrics, like polyester upholstery fabrics. They're often used for furniture, I think, especially couches or something that needs to be heavy duty. I like how they're durable and thick. And they come in such patterns that I really like, and they're a little shiny. So it gives such a great effect to the quilts that I make. They're great as a background, they're great as a pattern. So I love upholstery fabric. There's one store in Queens, so deep in Queens you have to drive there, it’s called Carle Place. They have a huge selection of upholstery fabric, so that's where I go a lot. And whenever I go to Korea, I bring a bunch of Korean silk that they make hanbok from. Silk is so expensive here, but when you go to these hanbok stores, they have a lot of scraps. They collect a lot of scraps and they almost want to throw it away, or sometimes they sell it to somebody like me for a very cheap price, because they can't use the scraps. So I go around the stores and ask them for scraps for a very cheap price. That's something I like collecting from Korea. And also a lot of cotton and linen fabric from Korea. I like fabric that's durable and very colorful, with a lot of patterns.

Can you talk about any imagery or symbols that you like to work with?

The image that appears quite often in my work is a lantern. I think it's because in the shijang environment, people use a lot of temporary lighting. They just use this light bulb connected to this long cord and they just hang it in front of their stores to light up the display. I love how they look. It's really organic looking, it's very wishy-washy, but how they're installed, it adds to the vibrancy of shijang. So I use that kind of image a lot in my work. I'm even thinking about making a quilt of them. I once made an image of a lighting store. If you go to Flushing and Queens, there's a lot of lighting stores that are owned by Asian owners, so they really inspired me to make this work “Lighting Store.” But I'm thinking to make a new work that's a lot of images of lanterns. So yeah, I think about the lanterns and lighting.

What are some of your favorite items to illustrate with fabric? Are they objects made of cloth? Food? Steel items?

I had a lot of fun with the shoe store, so I might make a second version of it to add to the new shijang installation. I just had so much fun, because if you go to a shoe store in a shijang, they're very cheap, but also they're made in such a free spirited way. They're not serious and the fabric they're using is so fun. It's not designer shoes, but you can see these little factories that are making their own shoes having so much fun. I can imagine people having fun making them. So yeah, I really like adding little ribbons, adding little fur trims around the cuff of the shoes. It’s just such a freedom of decorating, and sometimes you just want to be decorating something without thinking about what it means. And I think shoe design in shijang is such a perfect example of it. Yeah, I had a lot of fun describing the shoe store. I definitely use the shoes at the shijang as references, but none of them are one to one depictions. I just got the idea, and then I was like, “I'm gonna just have fun.”

Your quilts are full of colorful patterns, yet each object in them remains distinct from one another. How do you achieve this visual clarity? What do you think about when you create the bustling scenes in your work?

I think that starting from making appliqué really helped. When I was making appliqué, I almost thought of them as 3-D. I even considered using them in a hanging fabric sculpture. If you make appliqué, it’s not just like cutting the fabric in the shape you want. It's more like cutting the fabric a little bit bigger than the desired shape, and you fold the edges into the fabric so it has a little bit of depth. So I think it helps that I consider it 3-D at the beginning of the work, so each of the objects have a little bit of shadow around it because they’re appliqué. It’s not just like a sheet of fabric that's sewn into the background. It's more like a little bit of 3-D sewn into the background. I think that helps bring some clarity for each, it just makes a little bit of a thicker outline of stuff. That helps a lot. And also I'm conscious – I don't design everything at the beginning, but when I have a bunch of appliqués, and when I'm laying them down before I’ve stitched them down, I'm conscious of what can be next to each other. So I avoid blue and blue. If they are too similar in color and they're going to blend too much, then I avoid them and maybe I switch them with different patterns and colors right next to each other. So there's a little bit of planning that way, before I stitch down everything.

I really rely on fabric itself, because fabrics are almost found objects that way, they're ready-mades. Actually, seeing the Faith Ringgold retrospective at the New Museum encouraged me to paint my own fabric, because she paints a lot on her own work when she's creating quilts. So I'm actually considering creating my own patterns, but I didn't try it yet. At this point, I use a lot of fabric that is pre-made, and it almost feels like collage or mosaic that way. People can just cut some parts of magazines or newspaper and collage, and a lot of patterns are pre-made. I feel a lot of the time like this is a collage of pre-made material, so I really rely on how they inspire me, not like I have such a clear idea. “Oh, it has to be a flower pattern,” I don't work like that. I combine existing patterns and see how they work together.

I love food markets and 시장. What are some of your favorite stalls?

Shoe market, that is definitely my favorite. And I do like fish markets, that's why I made them twice. I like shiny, and fish markets are very shiny. It’s a little scary, if you think about it, because they're dead bodies. I actually went to the fish market with my husband when we visited Korea, and he was like, “I've never seen this many dead bodies.” I had never thought about that. But I like how they're so silver, and gold, and shiny, and how they also have a different texture of scales and everything. I just like really loved describing that with a lot of silver fabrics.

I often see fascinating depictions of minerals in your work. What draws you to depict rocks and minerals across so many mixed media?

That was a huge interest of mine a few years ago. I think I'm a very object-oriented person, like I respond to objects, whether it's in the store or on the ground, I just like objects, and holding them, and thinking about them. At some point I really got into natural history museums, especially mineral sections, because they're such a familiar size, but they're so alien looking. It's just such a weird thing that people take little parts of the Earth and display it like it's some kind of gem. So I ended up thinking, what are these artifacts? What is this small piece of Earth people like looking at? Of course, I understand – they’re beautiful, they're alien looking. And at some point, I also realized they're real materials that I'm actually familiar with. For example, this super blue-looking mineral is actually part of my phone, or this beautiful crystal quartz is an ingredient for silicone I use all the time. So I realized there’s this huge gap between this alien-looking, mysterious, beautiful ore, and the product that I'm using. So I thought about this big gap, and then I was thinking, what is this disconnection between the raw material and my modern life? So I was thinking about returning the objects back to the rocks, back to their original status, and thinking about how the objects that we are using are actually materials that have their own life. They have their own energy and behavior. So that was the idea of the work, thinking about objects as raw material and how they're not just passive beings but they're like active living things, almost.

What are your favorite colors? Do they find their way into your artworks?

It changes all the time. But I think I constantly like mint green. It changes all the time, like these days I like yellow. Also, it responds to what kind of item I buy, like I bought this little purse recently that's a lavender color, and for now that's my favorite color. But I think I always have a love of the mint green color.

Although my work often looks very colorful, I don't really make colors myself. I rather rely on the color of found objects, or found material, or found fabric. I don't think I have confidence in color. Like, painters always make colors and they create the whole color palette themselves, and I don't think I have confidence in that. Also I think it's just such a weird thing how every pre-made object has such a like vibrant color scheme, so I kind of tend to rely on just collaging existing colors next to each other.

Is there a new medium that you would like to try or to work in more?

Yeah, I want to go back to some materials. I really like materials that change state from liquid to solid, solid to liquid. I just like observing the point that they change state. So I love wax because it changes so quickly, and it also looks very funny when it changes state. I just love that. I like plaster too – plaster changes from liquid to solid very quickly. And I like silicone, like how you mix two materials and they become weird and rubbery. So I think about this change of state a lot, and I'm thinking how I'm going to adapt it to my textile project. It's very vague, at the beginning stage of my thoughts. I'm thinking about making some fabric that can be kind of like a 3-D sculpture, or have a little bit more relief from the wall. So I'm thinking about different kinds of materials and maybe mixing it into my fabric.

I think this is also the reason I like fabric, I just like thinking about how materials end up looking. Materials really look funny when they change status. Even fabric, like how, if you see a cotton boll, they're so fluffy, and it's like a bunny thing. And then this bunny kind of gets brushed, and then they get spun into thin thread, and this thin thread is woven to each other and becomes this big sheet. It's almost like alchemy, if you think about how materials change. So I just love thinking about how materials can do that, and how they can be so flexible in the world, and how they can suddenly fit into some little space that they're not supposed to, and then suddenly they can break out of it. It's such a weird thing.

Where are you located now? Do you think where you are located influences your practice?

Definitely, a lot. My recent work, a big portion of it is observing and describing the landscape of Queens. So living in Jackson Heights, living in Ridgewood, working at the Queens Museum, everything influences me. The landscape, and how Queens is such a weird, unique place and every neighborhood looks so different. Every neighborhood is so full of life, and full of neighborhoods. It’s definitely influenced me. And Queens is such a place of objects. Queens is full of objects. You go on a walk, you'll see all kinds of objects as trash. I like how Queens has a lot of trash – it’s a weird thing to say, but if I go someplace that doesn't have trash at all, I feel very anxious for some reason. I was doing a residency in Nebraska City for two weeks, and I didn't find a single piece of trash, and I was extremely anxious. I was like, where's everybody, are there humans here?

How do you stay connected to your community?

That's something that I'm still learning in America. I think this idea, or nuance of community is very different in America than Korea. And community is almost like an assignment for Americans. You're born as part of a community in Korea. Whether you like it or not, you're already part of the community. I think people spend energy trying to get out of it more in Korea, because you're too deep into it, like from day one. And then in America, I think people's premise is that you're out of community already, and you have to find your way to attach to it. So I don't know, it's a weird idea to me. There's a lot of conversation about community here. Whenever you work with a museum, they're like, “Oh, today's gonna be community day and artists are going to do some community workshops!” I kind of get the idea, logically, but my feeling is, aren't you already community? Don't you want to get out from it? I think that's such a Korean instinct to me. I’m already so involved in my family business and my school reunion stuff, Seoul National University is still sending me emails. Everybody already knows me and everybody already knows everybody's business too much. And ever since I came to the US, I'm already connected with the Korean community. Like, Korean artists already know each other, introduce each other to each other, and they know some deep part of their life, even before they know each other. It's just such a premise to me as a Korean, coming from Korea and having Korean family. So I never feel like I'm detached from it, like in America where it is such an assignment. How do you have to search for community? What do you mean? You have to get out from your community!

What’s your favorite tool?

At this point, a sewing machine. And I'm learning it's almost like people who are into cars or cameras. Sewing machines can have so much variety and so much brains in different versions. There's this dream sewing machine. I was looking at this video of Bisa Butler. Oh my gosh, she had such a fancy machine. The machine moves above the fabric. I was fantasizing about that machine – I’m still fantasizing, one day I'm going to have funding and I'm going to buy this $10,000 machine.

What is the space where you do your work?

I have a studio at home, and there's this one room that has a north-facing window, so it has really great light. Not super direct light, but it really gives a good sense of color and everything. Also there's a huge tree right out the window. It covers my window, so I like how I can keep the blinds up and nobody's going to see me, even during night. I really like that it changes color throughout the season.

Do you have any ritual that helps you get into the zone?

I would say radio. I am such a radio listener, especially Korean radio. I grew up listening to the radio in Korea, and Korean radio has such a ’90s, 2000s sentiment. They used to always say some mellow things and read some letters. So I have such an attachment to that time and sentiment. I found this radio station that's so perfect for that. There's this duo of woman singer-songwriters, Rooftop Moonlight. They have such a good radio sentiment that I am drawn to. They’re funny, they chat, they’re musicians, so they can also recommend some nice music. That's the first thing I do when I come up to the studio, I play the radio. I kind of have trouble working without radio. Even when I'm not paying attention to it, I like listening to the background sound. I don't like listening to radio shows about something serious or heavy. I don't listen to anything like politics, literature, or art, I just like listening to this Korean radio show that's really light and kind of cheesy.

When do you know when you are finished with your artwork or a body of work?

Actually, that's one of the most difficult parts for me. With a textile project, actually, it’s easier, because you can kind of tell when the scene is becoming too busy. I can kind of feel the point that I have to control myself. I'm adding too much. I have such a desire of decoration whenever I'm making quilts, so I stop when the scene becomes too busy. But with my previous sculpture projects, I kind of stopped when my heart stops. When I just start losing interest in the project, at some point, I can feel I'm just forcing myself to keep making it. For example, the mineral series, I kept making these fake minerals using daily objects, and there was a huge group of them. At some point, I was like, “I'm gonna have an exhibition next year, and this is gonna be the space for me, I want to fill it up.” I was just adding things out of duty or pressure, and that was the time for me to stop. I was like, “I want to be excited when I'm making this.”

Are there any Korean artists who you especially like?

It really changes, because all the time I'm looking at different kinds of artists. But I remember one exhibition that I saw in Korea, I think it was quite a few years ago. The artist’s name is Jewyo Rhii. She does a lot of installation. She seemed like somebody who changes her subject all the time as well, especially because her work is very about her daily life. The exhibition that I saw was a mixture of her work that she made when she was in Berlin and some work that she made in Korea, and a lot of her installation was so much about her dealing with her domestic environment. There are some sculptures that she made using window parts, because she didn’t have enough space in her Berlin apartment, so she had to use the window as her own shelf. But at the same time, she felt a little anxious as an immigrant who's living in this foreign city, so she mixed that shelf with some kind of wire that looks like a thorn or a defensive mechanism. Her sculptures are very honest in dealing with her daily life, and it almost looked like how animals make their own territory, like some defense mechanism, and it's a mixture of whatever material they can find. It’s about making it comfortable, but at the same time, defensive and hostile. I really liked how it's so honest and very closely attached to her daily survival and daily life, it was just such an honest work. I think making that level of honest work is really difficult for any artist.

Who are your favorite practicing artists?

I really loved the Faith Ringgold retrospective at the New Museum. Her quilting was such an intense and honest work. Also, she made a lot of children's books, and there’s such tenderness and images that are so vibrant and so true. Also, the way she quilts, she collaborated with her mom in earlier work because her mom was also a quilter. So I really love that idea that you can inherit the legacy of your parent’s craftsmanship. It was such a wonderful thing. And when I was in Italy for the Venice Bienniale, at the Polish pavilion, I didn't know this artist before, but her name is Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. For the whole pavilion, the entire wall was textile. It was quilted images of daily life and of zodiac signs. She's Roma ethnicity, so she describes the story of Roma people migrating, which is also true to her own narrative. She wanted to tell the story through this quilting project, and mixed it with her own daily life as a quilter. It was just so beautiful, it was fantastic. I couldn't get over it. I couldn't leave.

What gives you the feeling of butterflies in your stomach?

Butterflies? Is it like a good thing or a bad thing? I'm going to say travel, because it's exciting, but I’m also kind of nervous. Speaking of which, maybe my mom's visit? Thinking about exciting, but also nervous, and super complicated feelings. Whenever I talk to her on the phone and she's like, “I want to come visit you, when should it be?” I think that's a butterfly moment. I love you, mom!

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