7 - 11 May, 2025 / NADA New York / Sooun Kim
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Patricia Fleming Gallery The Starrett - Lehigh Building NADA New York / Booth: A109 601 W 26th Street
7 - 11 May 2025 New York, NY 10001
For NADA New York (2025) Patricia Fleming Gallery is presenting a suite of new paintings by Glasgow-based artist Sooun Kim alongside his groundbreaking video Echoes (2023).
Conceptually, Kim’s practice holds together the places in which he has lived — the volcanic island of Jeju (South Korea), Glasgow and the Scottish Highlands — varying social histories that affect his being in the world as well as global conversations about climate change, colonialism and the seeping influence of urban mass culture.
With a background rooted in classical painting, Kim’s artworks are formally meticulous and hyperreal. Read intertextually, they resonate a method of speculative fictioning seen most beautifully in the writings of J. G. Ballard or William S. Burroughs. These paintings are hallucinogenic; heterotopic, in that they juxtapose incompatible temporalities and differing senses of reality within a single world space.
Evolving from Kim’s recent video Echoes — an audio-visual portrait of the artist himself — these paintings refuse to picture this world as a static image, something we passively glimpse through a landscape, photograph or a digital screen. With only a few discernible details, these ambiguous compositions seem to position us in the midst of this place as it grows, ever becoming. Indeed, if the history of painting — the history of image making — implies a distancing frame, Kim’s digitally inflected abstractions position us within that very frame; it is like we are looking out from behind the glass of a digital screen, interdependent with a process that gives symbolic tropes their social meaning. Kim’s image-work is not reflective in this regard, it is speculative, anti-hegemonic, and rife with optimistic futurity.
Contact gallery@patricia-fleming.com for further information
Sooun Kim 김수언 (b. 1989, South Korea) uses sound, video, painting and installation to conjure incongruous worlds. Clashing contemporary signs and symbols resonant with Korean cultural traditions, Kim’s artworks trouble romantic notions of cultural hybridity, foregrounding the effects of post-colonialism and his felt experience of diasporic migration.
Kim studied classical painting at Chung-Ang University, Seoul (South Korea) and Nottingham Trent University (UK) before completing his MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in 2020.
Recent solo exhibitions include: The Briggait, Glasgow, UK (Upcoming); Bank Commissions, Outer Spaces, Glasgow, UK (2025); Glasgow International Festival, Glasgow, UK (2024); Echoes, Patricia Fleming Gallery, Glasgow, UK (2024); Ramifying Frost (Supported by Creative Scotland), Goethe-Institut, Glasgow, UK (2023).
NADA New York
May 7–11, 2025
The Starrett-Lehigh Building
601 W 26th Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001
(Enter on 11th Avenue)
Friends of NADA Preview (Members Only):
Wednesday, May 7, 9:30–10am
VIP Preview (Invitation Only):
Wednesday, May 7, 10am–4pm
VIP Hour & Breakfast Reception (Invitation Only):
Friday, May 9, 10–11am
Open to the Public:
Wednesday, May 7, 4–7pm
Thursday, May 8, 11am–7pm
Friday, May 9, 11am–7pm
Saturday, May 10, 11am–7pm
Sunday, May 11, 11am–5pm
