Annette Miae Kim

Fine art portfolio

Los Angeles

2019
42” x 112”
Corrugated cardboard, newspaper, tissue, acrylic, metal clips, nails

California

2023
48" x 138"
Corrugated cardboard, newspaper, tissue, acrylic, metal clips, nails

Armenia/Korea

2024
48” x 178”
Corrugated cardboard, newspaper, tissue, acrylic, metal clips, nails

Conversations with my Father

2024
64” x 243”
Canvas, newspaper, tissue, acrylic, metal clips, nails

Mapping the Negotiations

2013
Digital video, plastic stools
Installation exhibited at HCMC Photography Gallery, MIT Wolk Gallery, Cambridge; Seoul Urbanism Biennale; USC Cinema Gallery, Los Angeles

Lexicon

2010
Photography, plexiglass, metal.

Wedding the Divide:
3 Installations

2002
Digital video, textile, rocks, feathers, sand, ink, paper

Artist Bio

I was born in New York in 1968.My family have been refugees, immigrants, missionaries, and citizens in North Korea, South Korea, China, Germany, Ethiopia, and the United States. Over the years, I have moved and set up life in 12 cities across 8 nations. In some places I could speak the local tongue fluently and in others I was more mute. These itinerant experiences are foundational to the themes of migration, diaspora, and language in my work.I now live and work in Los Angeles, making maps. My cartographies take the form of abstract collage paintings, cinematic videos, interactive media, and installations, traversing the tension between the material and digital world. My social practice research involves long-term collaborations with community-based arts organizations, building cultural asset maps that recover histories and narratives of marginalized peoples and places.I am a co-founder of RAP: the Race, Arts, and Place collective. My work has been shown internationally. I hold faculty appointments at USC’s Price School of Public Policy and Roski School of Art and Design.

Artist Statement

Since 2014 I have been making expeditions across Los Angeles and Orange County, collecting ethnic newspapers and the words on buildings. I’m fascinated by how people use words to express themselves in public space. This linguistic landscape displays freedom, messy democracy, and the human will to communicate.I have been using these collected words to make scroll maps that unfurl and wrap around building corners, engaging the viewer’s body to move as they take them in. Laid with a foundation of newspapers of different languages, I layer fragments of more words, colors, and textures that speak to languages’ handmade and social construction. They extend the recurring themes in my artwork of grid systems, manual manipulation, cultural interaction, and nonverbal gestures.While cartographic conventions were invented to conquer territories, I seek to de-colonize the map. My maps survey overlooked peoples and places rather than reify borders. My cartographies layer ephemeral space-time topographies and cultural vocabularies.
Maps name spaces into places.