featured artists
patchwork perspectives
Cut, stitch, and disrupt with artist, Yeon Jin Kim.
Born and raised in Seoul, Yeon Jin Kim relocated to New York two decades ago, where distance sharpened her understanding of Korean aesthetics and the undervalued artistic traditions of women.
Her journey began with Jogakbo, the Korean patchwork technique she first encountered in her aunt’s hanbok shop. Inspired by its improvisational beauty, she reinterprets the form using unconventional materials such as commercial plastic, vinyl signage, and outdoor fabric, all stitched together to form intricate compositions. Much like traditional Jogakbo, her works preserve remnants of the past, infusing discarded materials with new significance.
Yeon Jin’s altered books extend this dialogue, interrogating the ideological structures that shaped her early years. By carving delicate lace-like patterns into outdated textbooks, such as Home Economics for Girls II (2020-Present), she disrupts the narratives that reinforce gendered expectations and nationalistic indoctrination. In Anthology of Violence (2022), she repurposes the autobiographies of South Korea’s military dictators, reconstructing their language to form lyrics from songs once banned under their regimes. More than artistic interventions, these acts of deconstruction and reconstruction are strategies of reclamation, exposing the tensions between personal agency and state control.
Her animated films similarly navigate themes of displacement and adaptation. Ghost in the Yellow House (2018) follows her cousin’s experience as a Korean immigrant in upstate New York, where social isolation takes on a haunting, almost spectral presence. In Monster Me (2019), a mythical beast emerges from Yellowstone’s geysers, consuming the artist before the two figures merge into one, a striking metaphor for the immigrant’s negotiation of identity, where assimilation can feel both transformative and erasing.
For Yeon Jin, creativity is an act of critical inquiry, an ongoing engagement with the forces that shape identity and belonging. Through her multidisciplinary practice, she invites viewers to look beyond the surface of each cut, stitch, and frame, challenging dominant narratives and transforming overlooked traditions and personal histories into acts of resilience.
