Philippe Hyojung Kim (b. 1989) grew up in a small town outside of Nashville, TN, and moved to Pacific Northwest in 2013. He responds to his cultural and physical surroundings by crafting objects and environments that exist in the space between painting and sculpture. His work references queer identity, artificiality, and language. He collages discarded plastic onto paper in configurations that read at once as painting, text and sculpture. He reuses plastic to create playful, neon-saturated sculptures that allude to our cultural obsession with this most ubiquitous and climate-endangering material. Kim exalts this quotidian material, at once giving it new life and highlighting the existential danger plastic poses.

His work has been exhibited nationally at galleries, museums, universities, and alternative art spaces across the US. Philippe is a current member of SOIL Artist-Run Gallery (@soilart) and a co-founder/curator of Specialist (@specialist_sea), an experimental art gallery in downtown Seattle. He teaches art and design courses at Cornish College of the Arts and Seattle Central College. He also serves as one of the curators for Washington State Arts Commission (ARTSWA) and as a board member of King County Public Art Advisory Board at 4Culture, Seattle, WA. Philippe received his MFA in Painting from Central Washington University, and he currently lives and works in Seattle with his husband, Drew.

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