To arrive at painting, one meanders in close proximity to ambiguity and doubt. Being very acquainted with the possibility of painting's disappearance, one paints simultaneously in the state of caution and abandon. In fact, a deliberate gathering of disjunctive formal motivations, checkerboard history, and subjective desire are brought into play in my work. While these are strange bedfellows on canvas, the object itself is held together delicately -- in material and spiritual terms -- by skewed reasoning.

However, a painting, even in its most rigorous self-examination, can provide a site of relief from its own weight. In my work, painting plays a distinctive role, like an actor. It stages in comic/tragic mode the ambient conditions of painting and their various problems. Yet it also poses possible responses. Ultimately, painting is about a psychic existence of idealism even in its most unseemly, depleted or decadent state.

The paintings are made piece by piece using a collage technique that combines characteristics of color form, child's play, and conceptual distancing. Language's visual possibilities intrigue me and are an important part of my work. Language offers allusions, quotations and elastic metaphors in tandem with abstract elements to dwell on, through a range of pop nostalgia, deadpan humor and obscurity. These jaded or absurd musings on the failures and pleasures in painting work as a disguise -- a perverse vehicle for a full range of emotional trajectories parallel to its history.

My work is the arbitrary yet precise measure of my fascination with reason and the frivolity of beauty in painting -- as well as its extravagant claims (however demoted) on itself. Melancholia and instability are its preoccupations, and impossibility and inertia its logical conclusions. Yet painting goes on. The gesture lives.

Joyce Kim
February 2003
New York City