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Kay Y. GIM

Korean-born Kay Yun Gim won early critical acclaim for her powerfully symbolic color etchings. In 1981, the Washington Post critic Jo-Ann Lewis reviewed group exhibitions of well-known masters, naming Ben Shahn, Fairfield Porter, and Martin Lewis, but gave a singular, special acknowledgment for prints on display by the young, mostly unknown Kay Gim. 

In her short career, Gim sought to bring her personal experience and cultural heritage face to face with the Eurocentric canon of Art History in images that embody themes of otherness and exclusivity for artists raised outside the sphere of Western influence. Titles of early works make this clear, as in the print "Melancholia in Exile". In "A Girl with Guernica" a young woman in traditional dress confronts Picasso's masterpiece.  

The artist herself offered the following insight: "It is a confession of the conscious and the unconscious side of my being in which memories, obsessions, fantasies, and dreams intermingle with one another."  - Quote from the Sunday Star Bulletin, Honolulu, December 1980. 

Unfortunately, Kay Gim's career was relatively short, and there are no records of exhibitions beyond a short period in the late 1970s and early 1980s.