The concept of “home” can mean many things. For artist Dave Young Kim, home “consists of the memories and sensations we associate with the place(s) we felt most loved and nurtured.”
Yet, Kim continued in his artist statement, “as the passage of time shapes our life trajectories, our idea of home becomes increasingly fragmented as the distance between then and now becomes irreconcilable. We cannot go back in time to that moment and relive it. Places morph; memories falter.”
In spite — or perhaps because — of this, “we are all looking for a place to call home.”
Kim, an award-winning fine artist and muralist, was born and raised in Los Angeles; the intangible quality of “home” is central to his work, which he’ll discuss at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy, closing Week Six for the Interfaith Lecture Series and the theme of “The Arts: Expressions from the Soul.”
Through his art, Kim delves into themes of nostalgia, war, conflict and displacement, expressing the multifaceted human experience in works that range from paintings and installations to videos and large-scale murals. In the past nine years, his work has been part of nearly 20 exhibitions across California and on the east coast, and in a 2023 solo exhibition at the Reese Bullen Gallery in
Humboldt, California.
As a child, Kim remembers “being loaded into my parents’ car — paper and pencil in hand — for the hour-and-a-half journey to my grandfather’s motel in Lake Elsinore.” His immediate family, plus five aunts, five uncles, cousins, grandparents and a great-grandparent, would spend all day at the pool, and “feast into the night. But with death, divorce, illness and disputes, this home only remains as a memory and in aging photographs,” Kim wrote in his artistic statement.
His “yearning for an unattainable past” shaped his choices during his formative years. He got involved with gangs and graffiti during the medium’s height in popularity, and his yearning continued to shape choices in college, joining a fraternity at the University of California, Davis, where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art. Pursuing his MFA in studio art at Mills College, Kim worked closely with Hung Liu, one of the first artists from China to establish a career in the United States, known for her work as a painter, as well as a mixed-media artist.
Kim is still exploring and playing with the idea of “manufacturing nostalgia as integrated with my family history, memory and identity. My artistic approach is drawn from a sense of loss or longing, looking for a place to belong,” he wrote, so his art reflects more than just his personal experiences — it reflects a shared human journey, a unifying search for belonging across disparate conditions.
In 2020, Kim co-founded the Korean American Artist Collective — an initiative that aims to foster a sense of community among artists whose work is rooted in the Korean American experience — which provides a platform for artists to share their stories, collaborate and collectively amplify their voices.
In attempting to “preserve, recreate and document,” Kim “appropriate(s) Korean symbols, patterns, colors, traditions that are simultaneously so familiar and yet also unintelligible to me in their storied meanings.” He’s interested in the tension between what he had gleaned about Korea from his family who left the country in the 1970s and never returned, and the “current-day Korea that has rapidly distanced itself from its history, and in turn myself.”
This year, Kim completed work on a landmark mural in Los Angeles’ Koreatown. “A Momentous Moment in Time of Passage and Landing” imagines over 30 birds traveling together in harmonious flight, each of them an official national bird from Asia and the Pacific Islands.
The flock of birds represent the diverse communities who now call Southern California home — a shared experience, a connected history, at the heart of the human condition.
