Joeun Kim Aatchim: Homed

Homed accommodates the drafts, those who have returned, and those who seek solace or are in willful solitudes. It is a psychological state of yearning to be settled; a state of relief in which one gasps and exhales, “Mom/Lord/Honey/My baby, I’m homed.”

The experience of language—its flexions and failures—is an integral concern in Aatchim’s practice as both author and visual artist. Like “homed,” typos, errors, and mispronunciations become sites of double-entendre and poetic happenstance. In one poem from 2019, Aatchim likens her nonnative English to a “struggling husband” whom she gladly cherishes in his homeliness. The shifting, translucent organza surfaces on which Aatchim writes and paints (a metaphor for, among other things, the artist’s partial inability to perceive three dimensions, also called stereoblindness) become similar spaces for semantic invention.

Aatchim’s insistence upon play speaks to her reverence of drafts—the intermediate and indeterminate stages in her practice. Works like Such Person (2013-22) and The Morning Squatter; A Funny Health Song with Pepe & Smiley Viskovitz (2019-22) comprise many older, newer, and unfinished drawings, remixed into their final forms with materials from different seasons of the artist’s life. A thin, bright silver ticket rack extends along the perimeter walls, framing the exhibition space. It’s the sort found in restaurant kitchens, sometimes offices. For Aatchim, who adds to and withdraws from the rack in real time (mostly with sketches, poems, desiccated butterflies, and other ephemera), the ticket rack motif perfectly summarizes the perennity of drafts.

Across the exhibition, Aatchim’s imagery is domestic and meditative. Gauzy silks and mineral pigments like lapis ultramarine and black jasper halo solitary scenes of grief, mother and child, and vespertine still-life. Each is a relic to the unassuming, unnamed labors through which we’re “homed,” and derive familiarity, if only temporarily, from uncertainty. The silk diptychs, Bail Mother Melancholy (Sunday Garden Given Forgiven) (2021) and the title piece Homed (Unwilling and Never Not Awkward) (2021-22), are stretched in a complex matrix of wood, brass, waxed cotton, and leather knots called  (jengteul-maegi). The apparatus originates in centuries-old Korean silk painting, and allows temperamental silk surfaces to acclimate to changes in humidity and temperature. Though traditionally used only as a temporary suspension, here they house the final diptych paintings, eternally attempting to make peace with their surroundings. They are one of many fruitful metaphors in Aatchim’s Homed.

Lover’s English (2019)

The way i learned to speak English for the first time was
lover’s kind. You guess what kind of troubles it might
have caused.

Joeun Kim Aatchim (b. South Korea) is a painter and multimedia artist based in New York City. Aatchim received her BFA from New York University, as well as her MFA from Columbia University. Recent solo exhibitions include François Ghebaly, New York (2022); Make Room, Los Angeles (2022); Harper’s, East Hampton (2021); and Vacation Gallery, New York (2019). Recent group exhibitions include Jeffrey Deitch, New York (2022); Harper’s, New York (2022); Make Room, Los Angeles (2021); and The Drawing Center, New York (2019). Aatchim has received fellowships at Triangle Art Association (2021); Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2019); The Drawing Center (2018-20); Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (2017). Aatchim will be featured in an upcoming group exhibition at François Ghebaly, Los Angeles in autumn of 2022.