Doongji Kim (b.1992) builds his paintings without reference to photographs, video, or preliminary sketches, working directly on the canvas through a repeated process of laying down paint and taking it away. The birds, fish, mushrooms, and trees that appear are less depictions of particular subjects than structures left behind on the surface after rounds of revision and selection. Because nothing is decided in advance, a form may surface in the middle of painting, disappear, and find its place again. His attention has long been held by the urban environment and his own way of looking at it. Having moved between different cities from a young age, he came to take a natural interest in the places he lived and the conditions around them, and he has understood the city as something made of people, architecture, and nature. The animals and plants that appear in his paintings sit at the border between the human and the natural, or move back and forth between the two, belonging fully to neither. What he captures is nature as something transplanted into the city. Although his sensibility is contemporary, his technique stays close to the classical. Building up thick layers of oil paint and drawing out the fullest possible texture, then removing as much as he has accumulated, he makes the methods that painting has gathered over time his own. Rather than dwelling on the artifice and fiction of things that try to appear beautiful, Doongji Kim looks at his subjects from a more realistic and sober perspective.

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