PHILIPPE HYOJUNG KIM

Jelly jelly jolly jealy jello jellies

A site-specific installation at WUG.

Artist talk and reception Saturday May 21, 1-3pm

1-2pm: Composer and ambient sound artist Nat Evans will DJ a set of mellow psychedelia to help elevate your consciousness
2pm: Artist talk

3001 21st Ave S, Seattle

April 30 - June 4 2002

About the artist:
Philippe Hyojung Kim (b. 1989) grew up in a small town outside of Nashville, TN, and moved to Pacific Northwest in 2013. He experiments with various materials and mediums in response to his immediate surroundings to make objects and environments that exist in the space between painting and sculpture. His work often references queer identity, artificiality, and language. He has shown nationally at galleries, museums, and alternative art spaces in Denver, Dallas, Los Angeles, Nashville, New York, and Seattle.

Philippe is a current member of SOIL Artist-Run Gallery (@soilart) and a co-founder/curator of Specialist (@specialist_sea), an experimental art gallery in downtown Seattle. He teaches art and design courses at Seattle Central College, and he also serves as one of the curators for Washington State Arts Commission (ARTSWA). Philippe received his MFA in Painting from Central Washington University, and he currently lives and works in Seattle with his husband, Drew, and their dog, Jack.

A note from the artist about this work:
My work often starts out as a painting or something that resembles a painting, and especially these days painting is part of a process for me to arrive at something other than that. Paint is a glue that lets my ideas stick. In grad school, I focused on researching paints and their makeup, experimenting with various types of pigments, colorants, binders, solvents, surfactants, etc., and eventually making paintings that are simply made of paint. In that process, I quickly realized most everything I used had some form of plastic in them, hence the malleability and durability. That plasticity in paint is what drove the tension in my earlier work, both materially and metaphorically, and evolved into the work I’m making today.

So, plastic is often thought of as this malleable thing, the ultimate material embodying modernity and universality, but it is perhaps the hardest and the most stubborn material there is. It is hard and stubborn because it refuses its environment, creating a sealant or barrier that remains impermeable to what surrounds it. In fact, once hardens, it often refuses its own kind to the point where it can only be fused through another heavy thermochemical process. But then, the lifespans of plastic products are often extremely short, and once purpose served, they turn into a kind of “living walking dead” among us. With this zombie mutant material, we have witnessed a total transformation and conception in matter and time, and of course, our perception of matter and time, just as it transforms any and all ecologies that it now composes. Despite, and perhaps because of, this devastatingly idiosyncratic nature, plastic continues to be a source of curiosity for me, if it hasn’t already consumed and become part of me. I’m still learning to deal with it, learning to take care of it, and making something out of it, since it is our making after all.

Especially as a queer, POC, immigrant artist, living and working in a hyper-consumerist/technocratic city like Seattle, I’ve been more and more unapologetic about celebrating my scrappy resourcefulness with a sense of humor and humanity. Although this topic of material relations, overproduction, and consumption of plastic can often steer toward conversations around recycling and toxicity of plastics, I am more interested in envisioning an alternative to the relationship we have with this material, with my work serving as a couple’s therapy or addiction counseling.