We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Taehee Kim a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Taehee, thanks for joining us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

I saw my potential when I saw how my art homework was displayed every time, no matter which country I was residing in.

I was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, then moved to Vancouver, Canada, to study abroad for about four years. Afterward, we moved back to Seoul, and in my junior year of high school, I moved to California and graduated high school here. I have two middle school transcripts and three high school transcripts in total.

Since 2014, I’ve lived in one place for less than five years. Given the circumstances, and not to blame them, it was not a great environment to focus on “studying,” if that makes sense. When you are about to adapt to this environment, with people and materials of study, the history of a particular country changes constantly. The way that each country teaches each academic is different. However, my artwork always got the spotlight no matter where I was. So, creating visual works was the only way to understand who I am and what I could do.

I slowly recognized that maybe my art talent has the potential to push. I knew that I liked visually pleasing materials. Therefore, I committed myself to two colleges to see if I could make it; I did, and as I spent more time and effort in the environment, I realized I wanted to pursue art as a professional career. I wanted to see how I could collaborate with groups of creatives to create even more pleasing and elegant works.

I believe in art and human interaction generally that we all are different and will never understand each other completely; however, if we know the circumstance that we all are different and accept others without judging or criticizing them, consider each other with empathy and not sympathy.

My mother was also a painter. Her interest and everything she did remarkably influenced me because, since we permanently moved around, the only female figure I always encountered was her. As I was growing up, watching how she dressed, how she did her makeup, observing her paintings around the household, and what perfume she sprayed… these memories made me focus on elegance, neatness, and beauty, which later greatly impacted my works.

I noticed that my approach to illustrations was sentimental, with colors, rhythms, and details that I provided with my linework, textures, and details. I tend to focus on the execution of the product.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My images focus heavily on visual satisfaction by focusing on details from corner to corner. I wish my pictures and designs would open up people’s sentimental feelings by releasing my mark-makings with delicate line drawings, decent small-scale dots, and color usages that harmonize. In such a fast-moving world, I wish even a short moment to take a look at my illustrations possibly provide a calm atmosphere to the readers regardless of whom.

Moreover, to capture sentimental moments in everyday life, providing little fun twinks of elegance on the way of approaching surroundings.

I do illustration, typography, and surface design. I’ve printed wallpapers, scarves, packaging designs, and books.

Silk material adds a sentimental sense to my illustrations. Silk scarves are functional items that could be transformed into art objects, which satisfies my philosophy of what art can do outside the frame.

My heavy interest in typography also expanded my eye on hierarchy and layouts, which led me to the final execution of the product: packaging and a book featuring my surface designs and silk scarves that share the narrative.

I mainly use 4B jumbo pencils, pigma microns, pentel slices, and watercolor on hard ground arches, watercolor paper, or Japanese printmaking papers for texture. I utilize ink pens to capture many details. I enjoy my watercolors, but I also have complicated relationships with them. They don’t always provide me with the desired result; however, they mainly provide satisfying results: happy accidents.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

One time, when I was taking a fine art class, we were given an assignment on our response to the book The Metamorphosis. I chose to do my very first installation art utilizing vintage photos I got from vintage shops. I cut out all the faces in the images and connected them in human silhouette and scale.

I could be wrong, but I thought that “collage” might be the creative activity most similar to human beings.
We were born from someone’s body. Collage is defined as copying and pasting from somebody’s artwork. We crop it out and glue it down to make a possible new whole art piece. We, human beings are social animals. We get influenced by each other from the closest one to our wanna-be. As every pieces we collect from each other adds to ourselves, non stoppable, “collage” like activity happens.

We rip apart or fall off some parts of the collage that we don’t feel like ourselves anymore, reflecting our forgetting of memories that could be just silly things or memories that used to be a promise we made not to forget. Some pieces we ripped apart from elsewhere are so old that ink might have flown away naturally.

This provided me with another perspective on people I encounter:
1. Recognize that there is no right or wrong in thoughts and feelings
2. Accept others without judging or criticizing them
3. Consider each other with empathy, not sympathy
4. Acknowledge that their grief is unique to themselves

In my conclusion to human interaction, just a bit of respect is what we all need because we are all different, and it is, again, impossible to fully adapt to each other. This generally provided me with my own answer to encountering people and what I could do with my creative skillset: I wish even a short moment to take a look at my illustrations possibly provide a calm atmosphere to the readers regardless of whom. Therefore, the calm moment eventually leads the readers in a beneficial way of what they pursue.

Love and peace.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

As balancing work and school, finding my resilience was essential.

Besides being an illustrator, I’m also an ArtCenter Illustration department Peer coach, Peer coach supervisor, Teaching Assistant, Head Server, and Photographer.

Peer advisors who advise peers on assignments and other matters. This position is an excellent opportunity to ask and bring me back to the starting point: Why are you doing art, and what do you want to make out of this? After providing it to the student, I redefined the desire with my creative thoughts and even asked myself the same advice. The basic questions always enhance or become the solution to most corners: Value, Scale, Contrast, Color, and what is your intention or voice?

Working as a server mainly awakens my desire to be creative even more. I believe nothing in the world awakens you, being in the environment working, and that this isn’t the best side of you, my creative side. It is also a very humbling experience because of the contrast between being a student at school, getting the attention I need, and serving customers at a restaurant. I probably won’t forget how busy I was in my college year throughout my lifetime—40 hours with a school schedule.

Sometimes, when I’m burnt out with creative work, working a part-time job definitely becomes my escape time. Encountering different people entertains me and even sometimes influences my next steps on my portfolio.

I always have to be engaged in specific environments to step forward regardless of where I’m heading. Every day, I learn something new from people: friends or strangers, even from the environments I always walk past or undiscovered alleys. It is always the calm, nostalgic moments of life that become the ground of my resilience, and it’s the influence that plays within my bowl.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://taehee.studio/work
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/taehee.studio/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taehee-kim-59338221a/