[Critique] Herry Kim’s Hyper-Analogue Eye - Hann Seulki
Herry Kim’s Hyper-Analogue Eye
By Hann Seulki
Since 2024, Herry Kim has been exploring a pictorial world through her character, 'Smile'. Her paintings, characterized by a multifaceted and bright palette reminiscent of the nature of Los Angeles and simple yet cozy landscapes, reveal an individual’s attitude—one that embraces and interrogates the absurdities of the world. The cuteness of the objects and the heartwarming tranquility found in Kim’s work induce a sense of naivety in the viewer. Regardless of whatever forms stand beside them, viewers come to mimic the inclusive attitude adopted by her canvas, which transparently reflects and projects them. Holding an intimate interest in every facet of the world, she aims to make the viewer's heart vibrate through her paintings. Through abstracted forms, we are able to indirectly feel and observe the unrealistic, and even transcendental, objects and phenomena she has encountered.
In Herry Kim’s Starlit Village, the world is rendered with simple intuition. The mountains, moon, stars, and rivers curled roundly within the canvas metaphorically represent the entire universe through simple shapes. Her paintings, composed of moist brushstrokes that gradually clarify a blurry world, remind us of our small gestures toward a vast universe. Smile’s body is oriented toward this world, yet by momentarily closing its eyes, it seeks to feel through the "touching body"—through tactile sensation—rather than through seductive visuality. At times, her character Smile gazes forward, contemplating the world, while at other times it closes its eyes, deeply immersed in its own dreams. This quiet time lag—alternating between taking the world in through the eyes and quietly ruminating on it within a personal realm—evokes the serenity and peace provided by a natural and generous flow of time.
In works such as Float, Starchild, and Serendipity, Smile gazes clearly forward with a quiet smile. The calm yet pulsating colors of the world reflected in Smile’s eyes capture the irregular nature and the flickering moments of the external world. These leave natural impressions on the retina with varying amplitudes and vibrations. The diverse colors of the painting metaphorically demonstrate her attitude of wishing to accept whatever object she faces. The naiveté of Smile seen in this attitude differs from a stance of accepting objects without any device. Her paintings are filled not with "true colors," but with colors of high luminosity. As the artist’s repeated brushstrokes layer upon one another, her world softly melts—resembling the hair color of the white-lit Smile—and these brushstrokes soothe the emotional amplitude of the viewer. This brings to mind 19th-century Impressionist paintings, which pursued a singular yet trembling "impression" felt truthfully at the moment, rather than fixating on trivial details.
Both I and Herry Kim were born in 1995; the generation born in the mid-1990s vividly experienced the transition of media from analogue to digital. We possess the experience of directly touching and handling media where history has permeated as an index, and perhaps because of this, we engage with various media while accessing complex experiential narratives. Consequently, such generations adapt familiarly to today’s virtual forms that resemble them. Therefore, Herry Kim’s sudden transition to painting, after having handled diverse media, should be examined with this background in mind. This text aims to explore the motivation behind her return to the medium of painting through her work that traverses the digital and the pictorial. Rather than merely analyzing the iconography of the character Smile, I take the position that her consistent critical consciousness persists through media changes, and I intend to examine how this has been modulated through various occasions and modes of expression.
1. The Predictability of the Digital
In 2017, Herry Kim graduated from the Department of Painting with works that realistically depicted her favorite mass consumer culture, and in 2018, she graduated from the Department of Sculpture with graduation works using quasi-corporeal materials such as fragmented human forms, silicone, and wigs. Subsequently, she moved to the United States and primarily explored virtual digital media such as NFTs and 3D animation until 2022. These works can be seen as an attempt to explore a new form of subjectivity faced by the "Digital Native" generation who spent their childhood in the 2000s. From a young age, Kim commonly encountered the possibilities of virtual reality through traditional "random chat" platforms like Omegle and Gagalive, as well as online chat platforms like IMVU and VRChat, where communication occurs through virtual avatars.
The chat-based digital media Kim focused on differ from traditional gaming environments in that they require no "given purpose" other than communication itself. Unlike games where users react relatively restrictively to given quests or missions, subjects in these chat platforms actively seek out their own tasks and organize actions in a purposeless state. Thus, the virtual reality in which they operate functions as an isolated place through which only an individual’s fundamental desires permeate. Within this space of purposelessness, the realization of human creative possibilities becomes feasible.
The potential for communication between others in virtual reality—which often seems impossible to even touch—the acts of intimacy that join separated worlds, and the solid identities of individuals that such actions simultaneously implode: these essential human aspects that only virtual reality can momentarily capture inspired her. She felt a sense of wonder at the new possibilities of virtual reality that allow one to understand and face an inscrutable reality. This characteristically positive attitude toward virtual reality is revealed in her later video work Avatars (2021). In this work, which she noted was produced while imagining the path to entering a metaverse space, various beings embodying virtual personas welcome the viewer with open arms and translucent bodies.
Even as seen in the single character who rejects them with folded arms, these different modes of hospitality are differentiated into various understandable forms, creating different intensities as they gradually approach at various scales. Furthermore, the surfaces in the video—which transmit all light while brilliantly reflecting diverse colors according to the details of the object’s form—ambivalently absorb and repel the object. This transparent surface, revealed through real-time changing colors, is a recurring element in Kim’s work from 2021 to 2023, directly reflecting the visual conditions of digital media. This is possible only within "simulation," which Lev Manovich described as a technology of new media, rather than the logic of representation adopted by traditional painting.
The "nothingness" of the environment we face to generate digital images is, in fact, captive to the designed structure of digital image generation tools. Specifically concerning the "transparency" in Kim’s work, because it is limited by the underlying code, pixels, interfaces, and program rules, it becomes easy to clearly restrict surrounding stimuli and regulate colors in real-time for transparency to function visually. However, there are disadvantages: it produces a relatively predictable image. Even if one does not accurately grasp the designed structure of the technology, repeatedly creating effects allows one to intuitively perceive the algorithmic structure and predict a future that crudely projects it. Consequently, the digital begins to be felt not as a site for producing "unpredictable sensations," but as a fixed space where humans can eventually surmise the end.
There is an interesting anecdote regarding this. In the online exhibition Grasping the Digital, held in a virtual 3D gallery, it is said that characters who were supposed to glow with moderate transparency became completely transparent within the perfectly implemented virtual white cube. Can this be called the perfect realization of linguistic transparency in virtual reality? Ultimately, in this work, fog had to be added to create another variable for the transparent objects to be revealed. This reminds us that causing "appropriate" variables to activate assets can be impossible or difficult within certain digital conditions. Conversely, one could reach the mundane conclusion that these effects are merely variables controllable through a few choices; it seems Herry Kim returned to painting from these aspects of the digital at that time.
2. Assets in Analogue and the Dream-Space When she began painting again in 2024, Herry Kim stated that painting felt more free in terms of expression than the digital. It is a highly interesting perspective that painting is "free" today, when Abstract Expressionism has become familiar and stale, and paintings after Minimalism have transformed into something like a "language game" by using objects literally—effectively becoming "conceptual" works—and subsequent figurative paintings adopt classical methods for identity politics. In Clovers, the first painting after her return, a face appears as if influenced by the golden age of 1970s Japanese shōjo manga, and various grasses, flowers, and stars are drawn as empty drawings. This work feels more compositional than painterly, as if stickers were being applied or digital assets were being arranged before rendering, highlighting the artist’s placement.
Starting from this work, Garden (2024), which features the same girl's composition, and the dreamlike Dreaming (2024), where Kim’s character Smile first appears, experiment with painterly surfaces composed of oil's characteristic entanglement of colors, colors differentiating diversely at outlines, and various brushstrokes. From Dreaming (2024) and the 3D animation Floating (on climate change with the Getty Museum), Smile is repeated in the artist’s paintings like an "asset" embodying K-Pop idols, which was a recurring theme in Kim's digital work. Although the repeated Smile looks like a digital asset, it is actually transformed into something closer to an "event" that re-emerges each time through the conditions of the brushstrokes and the order of the canvas.
Smile's appearance was devised based on Kim’s various visual experiences. While resembling deformed manga characters, it appears as a cute figure wearing a puffer jacket and shorts, inspired by the attire of people in California where Kim was active from 2021 to 2024. However, in the process of immersing herself in painterly expression, she says that the form of Smile, which frames the plane, sometimes feels like an excuse for the act of painting itself. Through irregular brushstrokes reflecting the order of each canvas, Smile’s modeling changes subtly every time. Although the primary forms—bright hair, sparkling eyes, and a faint smile—are the same, in the artist’s imagination, which refers to no object, the expression is merely "similar" and cannot be identical.
This repetition of Smile and the painterly expression of each canvas, possessing individual specificity, create a strange sense of unfamiliarity when placed sequentially in an exhibition space. While adopting similar compositions, the modes of expression vary boldly—using dripping as in Digital Explosion, or fragmented brushstrokes reminiscent of digital glitches as seen in Digital Field and Dreaming Head. These experimental modes of expression are diversely modulated and fill the interior of Smile in various combinations.
Furthermore, just as Kim’s paintings previously functioned as canvases filled with taste—like stickers—or emphasized the motif of "dreams" through a character embodying childhood dreams, her canvas functions as a site of dreams where it is possible to draw both rational reality and illogical, irrational phenomena simultaneously, much like Surrealism. Just as an object reflected in Smile’s eyes exists by reflecting variegated light, yet the object itself is absent, the imagination regarding the hidden parts of the 2D plane is entirely left to the viewer. This maintains an ambivalence where it could be a massive object or merely a shallow surface. Thus, in painting, it is possible to pursue only the phenomena derived from unknown causes, rather than adding fog or background colors to reinforce logic as in the digital examples.
Rain concretizes this dream-space, explaining a method of painting different from the digital that employs a transparency similar to the aforementioned digital examples. This painting is rendered with free brushstrokes at the boundary between Smile’s whiteness and transparency. Smile sits firmly amid pouring colors as if it were raining, yet melts transparently while reflecting surrounding colors in a peach hue. And the steady eyes clearly reflect the colors reflected before them. The smooth, wavering surface scatters diversely, causing the viewer to perceive this scene as an unrealistic and timeless space in constant transition, rather than a fixed world.
3. Hyper-Analogue Kim’s painting does not, however, function as an escape from reality. Like the AI in ChatGPT (2025) that listens to our questions with curious eyes, the objects she selects—even if somewhat simplified and made "cute"—clearly refer to the realities we face and reflect the new era of technological development. However, such reflection is not conscious in Kim’s work. Kim paints with her own rule: "to paint without referring to any specific reference". This rule is related to letting her inner flow—fragments of past tastes and culture—be revealed naturally without consciously removing them.
The digital sensation of arranging forms that presupposes layers, modules, and assets, and the icons in culture that guarantee specific emotions devised by past media—these flow in an "excessive" (hyped) state within the painterly practice. However, they are recorded and accumulated within painterly expression. And they advance to the next painting. Kim’s primary use of fluorescent colors that gather and amplify light may also be a way of revealing this excess and divergence.
Kim’s work is often easily understood only from the perspective of "Kawaii aesthetics" due to iconographic similarities. The digital generation, which began to bodily internalize digital culture in the 1980s and 1990s, grew up watching Japanese anime during a childhood where they meticulously tuned their relationship with the world through vision rather than language. Kim likewise chose to reveal the methods of a mixed era by drawing assets and media conditions into her painterly practice, rather than directly representing the culture of the times. Today, such cultures have moved to the software of virtual capital corporations through OTT services. Furthermore, AI neatly condenses all information. Facing this, in what way will Herry Kim’s painting change?
Hann Seulki (b. 1995) earned her B.F.A. from Seoul National University’s Department of Painting and completed her M.A. coursework in Art Management within the same institution's interdisciplinary program. Following her studies, she contributed to the realization of exhibitions such as Unboxing Project 2: Portable Gallery (2023) and Abstract Gestures from Female Painters (2024) at New Spring Project, navigating the commercial landscape where artworks traverse the boundaries between the primary and secondary markets. Her practice encompasses a wide range of professional engagements: crafting exhibition texts, refining technical descriptions through intimate dialogues with artists, and providing hands-on support for the installation and de-installation of peers' works.
Furthermore, Han has played a role in synthesizing disparate works—each embedded with its own unique context—into tangible market metrics, whether as ruthless price tags, simplified statistical data, or predictive trends defining an artist’s trajectory. Her experience also extends to examining the physical condition of canonical works previously encountered only in art history volumes, translating their material presence into precise linguistic descriptions. Currently, her research focuses on the distribution and physical movement of paintings produced from diverse perspectives, as well as reconsidering and documenting the discourse surrounding the materiality of contemporary painting. She also serves as the administrator and a lead contributor for Chop-Chop.
