Mie Yim

Episode 8Mie Yim
Series

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.

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Episode 8 of 14

Mie 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.

Episode

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Thistle
Wax Museum
Fever
Sheepwolf

Sheepwolf

Mie Yim’s "Sheepwolf" is a clash of textures and shapes, blending softness with sharpness, animal with machine. The overlapping forms suggest duality—comfort and danger, belonging and alienation. It’s a visual metaphor for navigating cultural hybridity, where identities are layered and constantly shifting, never settling into one fixed form.

 

Mariposa
Sunny side
Absolem
Mie YimAbsolem, 2023
152.4 x 121.92cm
Featured Artist

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Mie Yim
Artist
Mie Yim
B.1963, South Korean

Hurtling towards entropy, Mie 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. ...

More Works By: Mie Yim

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Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux
Series: Fractured selfEpisode 9
Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux

Reclaiming ancestral memory as a spiritual and political space for Afro-Caribbean identity and resistance

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