featured artists
WHEN THE BODY PAINTS
Witness emotion in motion of artist, Luna Kim.
Luna Kim’s works are rooted in movement, emotion, and the physical sensations of the body in motion. Rather than depicting fixed subjects, her creative process seeks to revive the fleeting sensations that arise during the act of making, those moments often hidden or lost in the finished product. Her abstract compositions give form to body language, translating internal states into gestural marks and textures.
She often begins with automatic drawings made with her eyes closed while listening to music or visualizing moving images. These intuitive sketches are later reinterpreted in oil, where the shift from dry materials to viscous paint invites more physical engagement. Scratching, rubbing, and painting with her hands, she allows her body to guide the work. Her approach feels spontaneous and performative, with each brushstroke capturing the rhythm of thought and touch as much as it does visual form.
For Luna, no painting unfolds exactly as intended. Each piece evolves through an ongoing dialogue between body and canvas. In Lunatics (2024), she initially painted the figure’s legs in a muted grayish brown but later replaced them with bold pink strokes, responding to how the original color no longer felt right in her body. In Music Painting (Shock) (2024), what began as a more defined sketch gradually dissolved into layered, expressive marks as her movements shifted during the process.
Between 2019 and 2021, Luna’s works became a way to navigate personal experiences with anxiety. During this time, distorted bodily forms often surfaced, figures that gave shape to obsessive thoughts and intense physical sensations. While these images felt deeply real, returning to them over time proved emotionally taxing. As her symptoms eased, she found herself moving away from these direct depictions and instead turned toward individual gestures and the act of painting itself as a space for release and healing.
This shift was evident by 2021, as her style merged physical imagery with energetic abstraction. Her works grew more textured, vivid, and emotionally layered. After a short break in 2022, her 2023 paintings reflected a new influence: personal travel and the natural world. Landscape entered her work as a way to connect emotion with memory, allowing her to explore inner transformation through light, color, and place.
Yet even as her focus changed, certain images remained. Vivid and recurring mental scenes involving pain or injury continued to surface in her work. These visions, emotionally complex and often both unsettling and strangely tender, are not easily erased. Painting offers her a way to process and hold them, creating space where memory, loss, and embodiment can be explored with honesty and care.
