Nathalie Karg Gallery is pleased to present Flash Back, an exhibition of new works by Sunny Kim, on view from November 7 through December 20, 2025, at 127 Elizabeth Street, New York.
Kim centers ideas of diasporic personal memory, loss, and displacement by exploring the landscape in relation to one’s interiority. With countless layers of light washes of paint, Kim creates dreamy, blurred atmospheres that traverse between the real and imagined. Rocks, mountains, water and light emerge and abstract, resulting in a landscape that is familiar yet foreign, soothing as it unsettles. The paintings hang flat on the wall frameless, in dialogue with painted poles situated throughout the space.
Earlier in Kim’s career she painted ‘girls in uniform’ , a metaphor for the immigrant experience and an exploration of altering history. As the girls began to exit the frame, the landscapes that solely existed for them have transitioned from background to subject. Flowing from one painting to the next, informed by the previous terrain, Kim follows a discursive process in her world of landscapes to draw out new colors, forms, and emergences of light. The painted strokes and drips intertwine to create a diffused, layered composition. These forms give shape to a sense of loss, contemplating absence as something that echoes a powerful presence.
The paintings, installed flat on the wall, simultaneously immerse into the space but also hover as images. This way of displaying her work emerged partly due to the need for portability, as Kim moves between the U.S. and South Korea, evoking questions of weight, movement, and translocation.
In front of the paintings are suspended ‘poles’ that have begun to appear in Kim’s work, extending the landscape, asserting themselves materially to engage the surrounding space. Reflecting the vertical energy of the drips and the colors of the paintings, they function as a cartographic marker, physically pinning the space we stand on. When seen together, they allow one to reframe the limits of the landscape; an interplay between inside and outside, far and near, destabilizing perception. Through this installation, Kim imagines a world that is fragmented, yet functioning as a whole.
