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Helen H Kim is a Korean American multimedia artist who utilizes photography, text, interactive performance, and social practice to explore how and where identity is created and belonging can be found. Born in Seoul and raised in Los Angeles, her hyphenated experience of navigating multiple identities and communities, as well as the murky non-places between them, informs her examination of the tension and fluctuation between outsider and insider, private and public, perception and reality, memory and history. Central to her practice is its accessibility to those who may find traditional art frameworks alienating or intimating. Bypassing common signifiers of the art experience, Helen creates narratives that rely on instinctual rather than intellectual resonance to make way for an emotional connection and insight into the complexities of dualities and power dynamics within cultural and social constructs.
Helen’s recent works include Home Is Where the Heart Is: Living in the Streets of Los Angeles (2018), which received funding from the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health and the California Mental Health Services Authority, and Our Only Guide Is Our Homesickness, exhibited at the Skid Row History Museum and Archive in Downtown, Los Angeles. She received her BFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Los Angeles and has exhibited internationally in the United Kingdom, Finland and India.
Helen lives and works in Los Angeles.