Sung Hwa Kim, Still Life with Jar, Pencil, and Notebook, 2024, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 60 x 48 inches

Sung Hwa Kim
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring

March 6 through April 5, 2025
Opens Thursday, March 6, 6–8pm

Harper’s Chelsea 512
512 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
Tuesday–Saturday, 10am–6pm

Harper’s is pleased to announce Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring, Brooklyn-based artist Sung Hwa Kim’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The presentation features new paintings by Kim and opens Thursday, March 6, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist. 

Throughout Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring, Kim expands upon his exploration of the traditional Korean white porcelain jar as a vessel from which to study the passage of time. He refers to these paintings as visual haikus: poetic snapshots of ephemeral moments that tend to reckon with a change in season and the climactic evolutions that distinguish it. Amidst these evocative scenes of juxtaposed transitions, Kim uses color liberally: brilliant pastels and hypnotic neon saturate ecstatic landscapes wherein urban greets the pastoral and daytime fades into the night. 

Works like Still Life with Jar, Moon Lamp, and René Magritte Postcard exude a dreamlike stillness: cool blue tones blanket a sleepy cityscape illuminated only by a crescent moon. But indoors, behind a vast window, Kim fills a jar with a heavenly scene of lakeside greenery, conjuring a pristine spring day. Beyond the vase, a luminous yellow orb bridges the two worlds. The bulbous lamp emits a gentle glow that spotlights beaming petals, trickling down from wilted grey flowers. Kim suspends the scene in temporal limbo across this ethereal work—the artist expertly stages diverging cycles of life and death. 

Kim continues to explore existential proximities in Still Life with Jar, Pencil, and Notebook, where time folds in on itself, and reality lingers in a state of flux. A rose-tinted sky melts into the distant cityscape, casting an ephemeral warmth over quiet rooftops—an ending and a beginning intertwined. Within an interior space, a jar holds a cherry blossom tree in eternal bloom, like an oasis untouched by the passing seasons. A notebook and pencil await just outside of the jar, signaling human presence, beckoning the viewer to partake in tranquil introspection.

Ultimately, Kim masterfully inhabits the role of guide, making perceptible the delicate threshold between what fades and what endures. In his surreal yet precisely rendered compositions, he captures the subtle transformations that flow between opposing forces. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring is an exhibition brimming with fragmented worlds—disparate existences and sensations, coexisting in fleeting harmony. By fusing contrasting geographies and temporalities, Kim beckons the viewer to consider the perpetually converging realities that inform life. Through these collisions, the artist challenges viewers to a meditative journey, soliciting the intricate webs that define both the tangible world and the great expanse of the cosmos.

Sung Hwa Kim (b. 1985, Seoul, South Korea) received a BFA from Art Institute of Boston in 2008, and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2012. Most recently, Kim’s work has been exhibited at David Castillo Gallery, Miami, FL (2024); Harper’s, New York, Los Angeles, and East Hampton (2024, 2023 and 2021); Art SG, Singapore (2024); Cob Gallery, London (2023); Everyday Gallery, Antwerp (2023); The Hole, New York (2023); Hesse Flatow, New York (2022 and 2021); Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles (2022); and Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY (2019). His work has appeared in ArtMaze Magazine, Whitehot Magazine, and New American Paintings. Kim lives and works in Brooklyn.

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Sung Hwa Kim, Still Life with Jars, 2025, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 60 x 84 inches

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