Seoul-based painter Yool Kim builds worlds from the inside out. Her mixed media works pull viewers into dense, layered compositions where human figures and swans intertwine, dissolve into one another, and emerge again — fragmented, multiplied, and achingly alive.
Kim trained in Color Studies at Hongik University Graduate School of Industry, graduating in 2015, and that foundation is visible in every canvas. She works from a single-color base — often red, purple, blue, or green — then builds upward through a full rainbow palette, creating works of extraordinary chromatic depth. The result feels less like paint on a surface and more like something excavated, as though the image existed beneath the canvas all along and Kim simply uncovered it.
“Where the Weary Rest”, Acrylic on Canvas, 45 9/10 × 35 4/5 in, 116.7 × 90.9 cm, 2026 – Galleri Christoffer Egelund
All images © Yool Kim’s Instagram
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Her figures are immediately recognizable and unlike anything else in contemporary painting. Faces repeat along limbs and torsos, embedded in knees and shoulders and knuckles, suggesting that the self is not singular but accumulated a chorus of past selves, suppressed emotions, and unresolved histories carried forward in the body. The effect is visceral without being grotesque, strange without being alienating.
Swans appear throughout her work as recurring presences sometimes graceful, sometimes feral, always loaded with meaning. They press close to her figures, merge with them, cradle them. Kim has spoken about wanting to capture the beauty of mutual care between living things, the tenderness of connection stripped of hierarchy.
“By hugging, touching, or leaning on each other,” she has said, “I highlighted the meaning of connection and warmth.” (via Court Tree Collective)
“At rest, entwined“, Acrylic on Canvas, 35 4/5 × 28 3/5 in, 90.9 × 72.7 cm, 2025 – Court Tree Collective
All images © Yool Kim’s Instagram
That warmth is hard-won in her paintings. Her work centers on what she calls “disorder” a psychological state rendered not just through facial expression but absorbed into every corner of the canvas, the backgrounds themselves restless and unsettled. The figures embody emotions that feel stunted or delayed, parts of the self that never quite finished growing. Painting, for Kim, is an act of organization a way of categorizing the chaos of inner life into something that can be looked at, held, understood. As she has described it herself:
“I draw a series of thoughts that are mixed in my head that have not matured, not grown unlike my body, as if dividing categories.” (via Colossal)
‘I Was Not Alone, 2025’, Acrylic and Oil Pastel on Canvas, 116.7 x 90.9 cm, 46 x 35 3/4 in – Rhodes Contemporary Art in London
All images © Yool Kim’s Instagram
Her practice has gained significant international momentum, with exhibitions across the United States, East Asia, and Europe. She has shown with Court Tree Collective in New York, Hall Spassov in Seattle, and Rhodes Contemporary Art in London, and appeared at the Outsider Art Fair. Features in Colossal have brought her work to wider audiences in recent years.
Looking at her paintings is a particular kind of experience one that rewards slowness. The longer you stay inside them, the more faces appear, the more the figures breathe, the more the swans seem to shift. Kim gives you a canvas that keeps growing.
Yool Kim is represented by Rhodes Contemporary Art, London and Court Tree Collective, New York. Follow her work on Instagram @yool___kim. Learn more at rhodescontemporaryart.com and courttree.com.
Featured Article Image: The journey to the stars, Acrylic on canvas, 65.1×90.9cm
