Solo Exhibition: Young M. Kim
June 3rd – 16th, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 7th, 2–4PM

The Riverside Gallery is proud to present
Ashar’s Wilderness – New Works by Young M. Kim
June 3–16 | Opening Reception: Saturday, June 7, 2-4pm

In Ashar’s Wilderness, Young M. Kim turns an unexpected material—sandpaper—into a poetic surface for exploring themes of dryness, longing, and renewal. The series began with an instinctive connection: the dry texture of sandpaper reminded the artist of life’s thirst—its abrasive, unsettled nature. Kim immersed the sandpaper in water, a symbolic act of quenching and healing, before applying diluted blue and green water-based pigments. As the colors naturally settled and soaked into the grainy surface, she allowed the process to echo nature itself—uncontrolled, fluid, and deeply rooted in feeling. Over these abstract washes, she layered delicate raindrop motifs, creating a conversation between desolation and grace. The result is a body of work that finds beauty in imperfection and transformation in adversity—where the very “stains” of life become the texture of meaning.

Young M. Kim is a Korean-American visual artist, a 1.5 generation immigrant, and a graduate of Pratt Institute, where she studied painting in the mid-1980s. Her early years in New York were marked by creative intensity and cultural dissonance—wandering through Soho galleries, grappling with postmodern theory, and shaping an artistic identity across languages and landscapes. Now living a life shaped by motherhood, family, and meditation, Kim’s practice remains a deeply personal search for stillness and clarity amid complexity.

Her influences span a wide emotional and stylistic range: from the spiritual minimalism of Rothko and Barnett Newman to the grounded light of Monet, the joy of Matisse, and the emotional force of Pollock. These diverse visual languages inform a unique approach that merges abstraction with quiet narrative. Each of her works becomes a visual diary—bearing traces of the everyday, the sacred, and the unresolved.

Central to Kim’s process is her daily meditation practice, which guides not only her creative rhythms but the energy behind her work. Her paintings are not declarations—they are invitations. They ask the viewer to slow down, to breathe, to sit with the stains and textures of life, and perhaps to see their own story reflected in the quiet layers of color and form. For Kim, art is not an escape from life’s imperfections but a way to dwell meaningfully within them.