Tae-Hoon Kim’s art is simply cute.
His collections of ceramic creatures look like they’re from their own happy universe, if not from the same strange family. Their heads are round like big, juicy honeydew melons, while their bodies are compact and genderless. Kim dresses his little friends in a colorful wardrobe, often involving a simple pattern, a lot like children’s clothes—stripes, dots, checkers. Some of them simply have hearts or bouncy letters going across their chests, like “I Love U.” Others exhibit subtle hints of their happiness—their left arm hanging up at a 90-degree angle, as if they’re perpetually waving hello to you.
“I like to make people happy,” says this Cal State Long Beach artist. “I like simplicity and childlike innocence.”
He sites Paul Klee, Damien Hirst and Pieter Bruegel as inspiration to his art. Klee’s simplicity, Hirst’s unprecedented work, and Bruegel’s pleasant colors and wit, he says, make him happy.
Most of Kim’s art is created at his corner office space found on the first floor of Fine Arts Building 2. Anybody within a 100-feet radius seems to know who he is. When I met him last Friday, his visiting friends came at random times, snapping candid shots of the giddy artist. Then his neighbor, working on a few ceramic pieces of her own, would periodically offer us bits of her rich, dark chocolate candy bar filled with chunky raisins.
This seems like a place filled with many voices and the perfect setting for constant play, but Kim, a South Korean native whose been studying at CSULB under a special student program since the summer of 2006, holds focus on a lot of things, especially his artwork.
He started showing his work in his home city of Seoul in 2005, then with moving to California shortly after he’s shown his work in dozens of art shows throughout the Orange County and Long Beach areas, including last year’s Annual Student Art Exhibition at the University Art Museum. (News broke earlier, that on May 15 his pieces will be showcased for this year's annual show.)
Kim also gained the attention of Giant Robot last year around fall, landing him a two-page feature spread in this art magazine that defines itself by covering “cool aspects of Asian and Asian-American pop culture.”
It’s a thriving idea for Kim. He’s refreshed and stimulated by American modernism and its freer customs (compared to South Korea’s constant struggle to remain traditional, he says). Here, he crosses the challenge of not being too commercial, carefully studying the balance between creating and selling.
Besides working with clay—making cute little creatures and plates and "happy pills" (these oversized capsule-looking ceramic things)—Kim also likes to paint and draw, and he spends a lot of time with learning new movies, poetry, and art. He doesn’t enjoy the fussing with traveling, but, interestingly, he's planning to make a trip to designer stores like Gucci and Ferragamo over the summer, Kim says, to study their design and “color-matching” expertise.
See all of Kim’s cute ceramic friends and "happy pills" currently showing in a joint art show with fellow ceramics artist Matt Causey in the Merlino Gallery. The show, “Dancing with Angma,” will end Thursday.
All photos were taken by Barbara Navarro in Tae-Hoon Kim's ceramics studio on Friday, April 25.
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