Myeongsoo Kim (김명수) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice is grounded in photography. Trained in architecture before turning to art, he makes images about distance, physical, perceptual, and emotional, carrying his photographs into layered constructions of acrylic, metal, and found objects where the space between surfaces becomes part of the image.
Since 2016, Kim has returned to the Salton Sea in Southern California. His current project, The Sea Changes Medium, sets it beside the Aral Sea in Central Asia, which he has followed since 2010 through nineteenth-century engravings, Soviet-era postcards, and other printed matter. The project asks what becomes visible, airborne, and valuable when a sea retreats.
Kim holds an MFA from Yale School of Art and a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. His solo exhibitions include Illusive Moon at Rivalry Projects, Buffalo (2024); Land Marks at Island Gallery, New York (2022); Desert Ocean at the Dr. M. T. Geoffrey Yeh Art Gallery, St. John's University (2022); and Mother-Land at CUE Art Foundation, New York (2020). His work has also been exhibited at Asia Society Texas and the Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, and is held in the TD Bank Art Collection.
His essay "Post-Sensory Romanticism: Hesitation, Duration, and the Ethics of Incompletion" is forthcoming in Afterimage (University of California Press).