Sanghyuk Kim

Sanghyuk Kim is a painter whose practice explores the fragmentation and flattening of time in contemporary image culture. Responding to an era oversaturated with stories and visuals, Kim investigates how historical and personal narratives lose dimensionality in the digital flow of information. His paintings confront this visual excess by creating spaces that deliberately rupture the picture plane—widening gaps, blurring boundaries, and exposing the limits of representation.

Working within the conventions of painting as a flat and bounded medium, Kim incorporates both everyday symbols and culturally loaded imagery, such as safety signs, AI glitches, classical sculpture, and selfies. These are not just visual references but temporal markers, pointing to the dissonance between what is seen and the time it represents. By manipulating pigment density and using complementary contrasts to generate luminous effects, Kim creates visual "holes"—moments of pause or rupture that resist the seamless consumption of images.

His work is ultimately an invitation to slow down, to reflect on the layered significance of what we see, and to question how meaning is constructed in an age where newness and nostalgia collapse into one flat surface.