hobong Kim

Artist Statement

A sheet of cardboard becomes a box,

and the box becomes a small chamber.

Inside, there is no product,

but a face resting quietly.

Strangers I met on a train to New York,

their shadows now seated in silence.

The Amazon smile appears here,

but slightly off, slightly altered.

It is counterfeit, yet somehow more honest.

Perhaps all the boxes we wait for each day

have always been carrying such hidden faces.

White lines scatter like drifting memories,

while the darkened visage fades,

then slowly emerges again.

It is not a complete portrait,

but a trembling presence in memory—

a confession that I cannot hold on to them forever.

This box is no longer a vessel of consumption.

It holds fleeting encounters, fading names,

and the warmth of borrowed moments.

Peering into it,

I remember the things I always forget.

"New York Rhapsody ”

Original painting works, works that digitized them, and analog works that drew New Yorkers directly on the surface of abandoned empty carbon boxes using charcoal. To me, these cardboard boxes are metaphorical symbols of the era in which I live.

Today, we find ourselves unable to escape from the extreme consumption culture. I have been dealing with the crowds of New York as a subject matter for many years, and I tend to look at them with interest in each and every aspect of them in the present era. A huge materialism and capitalist city where different faces of various races coexist, New York, the Tower of Babel of desire, immigrants are living in there.Chasing what they can't catch in it, and I find myself through them.

Our image of losing many things due to the lack of humanity in the midst of material abundance is shown through them.” The lives of New Yorkers are overlapped with cold acrylic boards and discarded boxes on the street.