Mie Yim
Fractured self
Imagine yourself as a mosaic - each shard a memory, each fragment a story. Identity is fragmented, nonlinear, imperfect. Through collage, artists reassemble past and present into visual diaries, embracing the messiness of memory to reveal a self that is ever-evolving, resilient, and beautifully incomplete.
View SeriesMie Yim
Mie Yim is a Korean-born, New York-based artist whose surreal, hybrid figures explore the fluidity of diasporic identity. She paints the in-between—between cultures, time, and self—blending memory and imagination into lush, psychological dreamscapes.
Her saturated, anthropomorphic forms reflect how memory mutates and how identity reshapes across borders. Rooted in her own journey from South Korea to the U.S., Yim’s work captures the strange beauty of being untethered yet resilient. It invites us to linger in liminal spaces—where transformation unfolds and identity remains in motion.
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"The pastel is a perfect medium for this. I wanted to make velvet soft imagery almost child-like but also addressing that darker underbelly to it.”
- Mie Yim, Brattleboro Museum
Absolem, 2023
In "Absolem," Mie Yim conjures a surreal landscape that feels both playful and unsettling. The central figure, with its vivid textures and fluid forms, seems to grow organically from the canvas, like a being caught mid-transformation.
Its tentacle-like extensions hint at connection and entanglement, echoing the diasporic experience of stretching across identities and spaces, always evolving, always adapting.
“The pastel drawings do the heavy lifting as far as putting out as many varied imagery as my brain will allow. I tend to hop on and off of abstraction, figuration, portraiture, landscape, all over pattern, surrealist mashups. On and on.”
- Mie Yim
Mariposa, 2023
Mie Yim’s Mariposa feels like stepping into a vivid dream—one where memory, identity, and emotion swirl together in an otherworldly kaleidoscope. The canvas pulses with energy: organic shapes seem to grow and shift before your eyes, saturated in pinks, purples, and yellows. At its center, a radiant, butterfly-like form blooms—a visceral symbol of metamorphosis, fragility, and resilience.
The title—Spanish for “butterfly”—is fitting for a piece that captures the essence of transformation. For Yim, whose practice is rooted in her Korean heritage and diasporic experience, Mariposa mirrors the process of adapting in unfamiliar spaces. Like the butterfly, the diasporic self is constantly in motion, balancing origin and reinvention.
Yim’s signature style—somewhere between abstraction and figuration—gives the work a palpable sense of life. Her forms feel animate, charged with a quiet emotional force that speaks to the universal search for belonging. Blurred edges and textured surfaces echo how memories evolve over time: softened, distorted, but still emotionally potent.
In Mariposa, Yim invites us to linger in this liminal space, where identity is fluid and boundaries blur. It’s a celebration of transformation—a reminder that growth often begins in uncertainty. Through this luminous work, Yim captures the beauty and complexity of becoming.
Multilayered Paintings
Hurtling towards entropy, Yim’s frenetic, multilayered paintings recall biological systems, the endlessly pulsating locomotion of New York City, and the exuberance of sexuality. Yim tends to laboriously work and rework the same canvas, a generative process which often results in an inner glow emanating from within her complex subject matter. By interspersing imagery that swings wildly between the figurative and the abstract, Yim subtly draws upon visual and literary references that range from Asian kawaii culture, to stories of ancient warriors, to art historical tradition.
"I started with the figurative images in recognizable forms. It was the most direct way of talking about identity, making sense of the fragmentation and dislocation of Asian diaspora. And then I felt like I put myself into a corner where I had the story to tell but the way it was being told was limiting or I knew it too well. So I ventured into abstraction."
- Mie Yim, Patron
Exhibition: Nightshade, 2023
Mie Yim’s first solo exhibition with Simone Subal.
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