HEESOO KIM

Normal Life – Cliché is not a rejection of feeling, but a reaffirmation of it. In a world that often chases after the extraordinary, Kim reminds us that what sustains us is usually what’s right in front of us: love, connection, grief, hope. These sentiments aren’t grand performances, but quiet truths, repeated endlessly. And in that repetition, they become real.

After a recent health scare, Kim paints with a sharpened sense of life’s finitude. His brush with mortality has thrown the often unappreciated aspects of human life—love, family, friendship— into stark relief. This sounds cliché, but that is Kim’s point. It is precisely these familiar notes that build the melody of living.

His new body of work pares everything back to let those fundamentals resonate. Anonymous figures exist in planes of muted tones, and as his style continues to mature he is unafraid to let his compositions work with more empty space than detail, as though pausing for breath. By stripping each subject of identity, Kim invites the viewer to step in, to feel how the ordinary gathers weight when time suddenly feels limited. The repetition of small gestures—an arm around a shoulder, a lingering gaze—become quiet memento mori and celebrations simultaneously.

This heightened awareness of life’s fragility also fuels Kim’s determination to keep painting “without retirement.” He imagines a studio that ages alongside him, canvases accumulating like the rings of a tree with each layer another humble attempt to honour the essential, everyday emotions that refuse to fade.

Kim’s roots in photography inform his painterly approach. Moments in his works feel paused, suspended, as though glimpsed through a lens. He draws on years of journal entries and personal notes—short lines capturing fleeting sensations, passing doubts, or moments of sudden clarity. These quiet reflections become the foundation for his portraits, which often feature figures caught mid-gesture. Such details suggest the emotional residue of ordinary life—the stuff that clichés are made of.

What might at first seem banal or repetitive becomes, in Kim’s hands, profoundly human. By refusing to title his works, he resists final interpretation, instead offering viewers a moment of emotional recognition that is theirs to complete. “I believe that it is in the artist’s karma to fill what is void, to make whole what is incomplete,” Kim says—a sentiment that runs through the heart of this exhibition.