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2100 Smallman St. Pittsburgh, PA 15222 | 412.261.7003 | www.contemporarycraft.org
Visual language has the ability to awaken the emotions, engage empathy, and motivate compassion. As I create and produce my ceramic sculptures and installations, my heart inseparably belongs to my artworks. Working with clay has allowed me to develop an incredible sense of freedom and honesty in expressing my own personal situations, allowing my work to grow on its own.
My work is based on my memories and experiences with people as well as nature, which in turn help me to create a relatable language for the viewer. My whole identity becomes rendered alive in my work as I carve, shape and color the mass. I am compelled to create concrete manifestations of my experiences and memories of childhood joys with colors, cartoons, toys, and sensations of innocence, mischief, loves, and relationships, which in turn help me to create a relatable language for the viewer. I struggle to evoke the most essential and significant human emotions and expressions through elements of humor, narrative, and comedic characters by representing myself and people around me as personified snails with a cartoon-like attitude. My belief and hope through such artworks are that I can inspire them to further observe and realize their inner, deeper issues of self-awareness and the precariousness of social relationships.
Jae Yong Kim
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