Bumin Kim is originally from South Korea and received her MFA in Drawing and Painting in 2015 from the University of North Texas, Denton, Texas. In 2017 she was awarded at the 30th annual international competition and exhibition, Materials: Hard+Soft. Her work has been shown by various institutions, including: Art Miami and Pulse Art Fair in Miami, FL; Dallas Art Fair in Dallas, TX; Art Aspen in Aspen, CO; San Francisco Art Fair in San Francisco, CA, Art Market Hamptons Fine Art Fair in Water Mill, NY; and Texas Contemporary Art Fair in Houston, TX. Furthermore, Kim’s work has been featured in publications, such as: New American Paintings, Fresh Paint Magazine, and Glasstire, and can be found in public and private collections throughout the United States, South Korea, Japan, and Europe. Bumin Kim completed an artist residency at Facebook’s headquarters in Austin, Texas in 2020, and her work was selected to be displayed at the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon in 2022.
Bumin Kim acknowledges the transformative power of materiality at play, and has repurposed the context of thread and string to emphasize the energy, delicacy, and grace of painting and drawing. Both the weight of the line as thin and singular, and the collection of lines en masse, as solid form, are tools which Kim uses to build complex forms that vibrate just above the surface. Kim’s intricate manipulation of materials highlights her ability to challenge the traditional model of what a painting should be. Brushstrokes become thread and string, and the flat surface is liberated to breathe into three-dimensional space. This echoes the charged expanse between the earth and skies in North Texas, where subtle hues and solid forms dissolve into immaterial prisms of flowing color.