Hanna Mi Kim (b.South Korea)

Korean artist based in Singapore

Absence cannot be hidden. It shows.

A curator came to my studio and asked,why mountains? Why soil?

I didn't plan it that way. It just came out, organically. But looking back, I think it was absence. Two kinds of it.

The first is physical. I grew up in Daegu, a basin city hemmed in by mountains. You couldn't avoid them even if you tried. I grew up walking on actual soil. Singapore has no mountains. There's no soil to step on. The city is sealed and perfect with lush greens. Maybe that's why my first paintings were all white. People said they looked like snow-covered mountains in winter. I haven't seen a winter mountain in over twenty years.

The second absence is harder to name. It's something about the times we live in. Images flicker past before you can hold them. Everything is instant, everything is digital, everything moves fast. And somewhere in all of that, a quiet longing for something that stays. Something warm. Something that doesn't update itself overnight.

That's what mountains and soil are, for me.