Minjee Kim — Correspondances #1

This is a story that began a long time ago. A story that reached me, passing through my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and my mother. Just as a life is passed down to me in that way, can the present-day me also reach them across time?

This is also a story that no one knows. As the countless past versions of me have gathered to form the person I am now, can the present me also go to meet the countless past versions of myself?

These questions are the heart of my art practice, which explores the idea of self through East Asian philosophy on Time, my birth religion Buddhism, and women's history.

In Buddhist thought, identity is not fixed. Existence is impermanent, a continuous movement of becoming and dissolving. The notion of an essential self is an illusion—only a temporary gathering of conditions, memories, and perceptions. This paradox forms the foundation of my work: why make self-portraits, and how? Is the act of portraying oneself an attempt to capture something that does not truly exist? Or can it be something else entirely—not a capture, but a conversation?

In my practice, I approach the self-portrait not as a record of how I look, but as a trace of who I have been, am becoming, and might never fully be. Each drawing is a meeting point—between past and present, between myself and the women who came before me, between the countless versions of "me" that have already lived and perished.

My artistic goal is to make visible the invisible threads that connect a self across time. I seek not to resemble but to witness the impermanent, relational, and ongoing process of selfhood. If the self is an illusion, what is it that persists? Perhaps it is a relationship to be traced backward through grandmothers and forward through daughters, rippling outward through all the karmic lives that shape a single life.

The artwork comes with a Certificate of Authenticity signed by the artist.

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