MIE YIM

PERMUTATIONS

NADA Miami

December 1 - 3, 2021

Olympia is pleased to make its NADA Miami debut with Permutations, a solo presentation of recent works by Mie Yim.

After a decade’s lapse in recognition, Yim’s emotionally plural pictures have gained much critical attention over the past ten months. Since her solo exhibition, Psychotropic Dance, at Olympia in January of this year, Yim’s work has been written about in Hyperallergic, Juxtapoz Magazine, Vanity Fair - Spain, as well as featured in Cultured Magazine, David Zwirner’s Platform, and LVL3. 

Mie Yim has been dancing in her studio, creating enduring inner journeys for the last thirty years. Without relying on external judgments, Mie has reinvented her painterly genesis time and time again. All the while, a stylistic groove has remained.

Yim’s paintings amplify anthropomorphic, subject-object spaces that fluctuate between figure and environment. The pictures reject any ‘pretty’ fate, privileging a self-referential physicality. They are cognizant of their own skeletons. The paintings are built up, layer after layer, often rejected, flipped, repurposed. Yim shatters aesthetics of beauty, and what it means to ‘finish’ a painting; suggesting we are always on the move. 

In Mie’s paintings, the figure is often the protector of, but subject to, its theatrical, colorfield environment; the figure quietly defends the picture plane while simultaneously accepting its envelopment. There is no distinction between capsules of flesh, architecture, and thin space. Boundaries are fluid. In an art world that fantasizes binaries (i.e. high art vs. low art, digital vs. analogue, east vs. west), Yim’s works embrace androgyny. While Yim continually inches toward new moves, so does she seize the topsy-turvy psychological space of dancing for the first time.