Soonnam Kim

Soonnam Kim is a Korean artist born in 1969 who lives and works in Seoul, South Korea. Kim studied painting at Changwon National University in Korea (BFA) and moved to the United States to pursue his art studies in 1995. Kim obtained his Master's degree (MFA) in Fine Arts with a major in painting and drawing from New Jersey City University in New Jersey in 1998.

She taught at various art classes in the Fine Arts Department of the School of Fine and Performing Arts at Kean University in New Jersey from 2004 to 2013 as an assistant professor. After 20 years of living in the United States, she moved to Germany in 2014 and lived and worked as an artist in Wuppertal, Germany until spring 2019. She visited many museums and art galleries, met artists and traveled to many cities and countries in Europe but also to India Dharamsala where she stayed for a month and attended the teachings of the Dalai Lama. She returned to Korea in 2019 and currently lives and works as a full-time artist in Seoul. Kim was selected as one of New Jersey's five Asian female artists by Dr. Midori Yoshimoto.

The exhibition was published by The New York Times on April 3, 2005. She was also selected as a 2nd Part Artist (1989 - 2001) Archive for Korean artists living in the United States. Only 46 artists were selected from over 200 applicants.

The exhibition was held at the Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY and the Korean Cultural Service, New York in 2014. Kim has had 16 solo exhibitions and numerous invited group exhibitions and art fairs in Korea, United States States, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Kim's artwork has evolved from semi-geometric lyrical abstraction to more curvilinear abstract composition over the past 30 years. Her most recent works are the New Symphony series in which she focuses solely on the harmony of lines, colors and dots.

She makes constant actions of adding lines and dots on the canvas with oil paint using a palette knife. To paint is for her to make symphonic musical composition on a two-dimensional pictorial plane, and at the same time it is her own meditation. She wants to be freed from all her permanent mental attachments that cause anguish and suffering by simply repeating the actions of the stroke of paint, and eventually create a harmonious visual status like heaven in her mind.

She tries to create classical beauty in her painting which is like classical music in which all beings can rest in the vibration and wave of peaceful energy.