The inbetween: not a place one can pin on the map, but rather a state of mind, one that the Korean-born artist Ho Jae Kim restlessly surveys. All preoccupations originate somewhere; many of Kim’s derive at least partly from his own life. Born in Seoul, Korea, he immigrated with his family to Los Angeles when he was ten or so. He was immediately slung between the language and culture of his adopted hometown and the one he’d left behind—of age “to have absorbed enough Korean culture to embody it, but still malleable enough to absorb a lot of new things.” His early intimacy with deracination, displacement, fracture, and loss perhaps accounts for his inclination toward “quieter scenes” from the history of art, for instance, the symbol-laden compositions of de Chirico or Magritte, from which he gleaned models for how to transmit the surfeit of human experience in meticulously constructed worlds ruled by metaphor and allegory. Kim has often called his enigmatic worlds, brimming with figures whose gazes we rarely meet and looming thresholds that beckon plangently, purgatory, and has drawn inspiration from the text of Dante’s Inferno. He aims to “paint the reality I live in,” and by doing so he helps us see and contemplate the complexities we inhabit, the turbid transitions that mire our own lives.

In Miami, where the sun brightens the senses, Kim found time for leisure, for healthy moments of rest he’d seldom allowed himself in the past. His residency was rejuvenating. During his time he devoted himself to an upcoming body of work that will debut at a pair of shows in New York City and Seoul. His recent paintings retain the force of his abiding fixations, but they mark in some ways a departure from his method. His work to date demonstrates his great facility as a draftsman, but lately he’s sought to wed this technical finesse to a burgeoning fascination with the potencies of color. His surfaces have changed, too. Thick swirls of impasto accrete in the newer works, the result of an impulse to “let paint be paint.” This process of discovery and experiment has yielded great pleasure, and even fun, a perhaps unexpected reward for an artist who contends so valiantly, so consistently, with the unknown.