Yula Kim’s paintings emerge from a search for certainty — one shaped by movement, memory, and a desire to exist beyond imposed definitions. Having lived across Asia, Polynesia, Africa, and Europe within a religiously conservative framework, her work reflects an ongoing negotiation between external expectations and an inner sense of self.​ 

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For Kim, certainty is the quiet feeling of knowing she is truly here, even as everything around her changes. Nature is where she experiences this feeling most clearly. Watching birds, flowers, flowing water, and feeling the movement of the wind remind her that she is alive, connected to the living world, and part of its constant change. Through these moments, she reflects on who she is, where she belongs, and how she can move beyond the expectations placed upon her. These quiet encounters with nature also speak to experiences that many people recognise—moments that gently remind us we are present and live within an ever-changing world.

 

Nature becomes both a point of grounding and a space of transformation where birds appear as recurring alter egos, embodying a quiet longing for freedom, movement, and expansion. Their presence is not symbolic in a fixed sense, but felt - an extension of the artist’s own shifting relationship to place, identity, and perception.

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Working primarily in oil, Kim builds her paintings through layers of colour and line, mixing pigments to create vivid, immersive surfaces. Thin and gestural marks accumulate, forming compositions that feel both intentional and open. Landscapes, contemporary scenes, and imagined spaces merge into environments that are at once familiar and elusive.

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These works do not seek to resolve a single narrative but instead hold space for a more fluid understanding of experience, where moments of stillness, observation, and emotional clarity coexist with a desire to move beyond the ordinary. Here, nature reflects a desire to hold onto a sense of certainty within the shifting conditions of contemporary life. For Kim, painting becomes a conduit — a way to access and feel nature more directly, rather than simply represent it. Through this process, she creates a world guided by her own sensibility, where certainty is not fixed, but continually formed.