“In Fall 2023 I moved from Berlin to New York. I found friends forever in this city but didn’t grew friends with this city. After almost two years living homeless and stationary, after all, I must return to my nomadic lifestyle, turn away from a studio-based practice and again towards home in hazard, hitchhiking with hammock, anywhere and adrift. I’ll miss you”William Kim is an interdisciplinary artist and community-builder. They live nomadic and spend little money on material. Kim's work has been featured in Synchron Magazine (2021), Artforum (2024), and Apocalypse Magazine (2025). They hold a MFA from Pratt Institute, a BFA from Universität der Künste Berlin, K-Arts Seoul and École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs Paris.
by Mia Pattillo
on william kim solo show
minimum two ideally never
2024A street is a narrative we swallow as children. It begins all silhouette, with insides still fragmented: chalk-dust dreams, scooter-swift freedom. Threads us into cotton-candy pinks and blues. We have carried its syllables since our knees first kissed this pavement.
To unravel our narrative, we must first know the city street’s corners. The in-between spaces that no one claims. Where nothing is happening but everything. A life comes untethered in the pinprick of a balloon. In the crash of a pigeon’s ledge, in the quiet snap of a bicycle spoke. Spaces of disruption and defiance. Sometimes it helps to look for it in a discarded vehicle, where motion catches in arrest. To find mine, I followed bicycle spokes to their center, traced their rust-suspended spin. Perhaps I am still learning to unwrite the script of nostalgia, to scrape away the calluses of remembered streets. To reconfigure a narrative, after all, one must first unconfigure it. Perhaps I am still learning to find a pulse.A narrative is a street that begins boundaried in. But there is something I want to tell you unboundaried by coherence. I want to shout it into the edges of yearning, toes curled in the urban grime. If it is yearning that I carry, then I carry its coins spilled heavy, in a chest too full for my lungs. So I am learning to speak to the corners. So I borrow the mouth of a pigeon. I am learning to say: a new composition of intimacy. I am learning to say: we.
If we are more than a silhouette of our identity… In our chests we harbor both a belonging and an unbelonging. Sometimes we trace their fraying seams in letters that sparkle, white facades yielding to confetti-veined calligraphy. Sometimes it helps to remember the light that fractures outside the front threshold, eight-ish blocks from Elizabeth St. Garden, then trickles slowly toward you, two floors up, until the small room warps into a ghostly cocoon of layered pasts.Sometimes, in order to belong somewhere, you must first belong nowhere. Listen to the cadence of footsteps at night. At night, we are rendered no more regal than pigeons. At night, a breath that drifts through the streets is steered only by the heartbeat of the moon, and a body that walks through the streets sloughs off as much as it gathers: forgotten routes, whispered confessions. Desires to be whole. To touch something that has been timeworn by the proximity of a stranger's body is to know that each groove in its spine, each weathered handle, houses the vestiges of a former existence: a corporeal intimacy. What echoes, what likeness, what manner of correspondence might we find inscribed? We seek our narrative in rain-slick streets where solace collides with kinship: adrift yet anchored, forgotten yet flash-fixed. We are, if anything evermore, in tension with the city that shapes us. A relation of shadow bodies.Forget a narrative of belonging—what I yearn for is transformation. Marrow-deep metamorphosis, thrumming with the chaos and boldness of early scooter wobbles, the anarchy and purity of playground symphonies. Outgrown dreams casting long shadows over chalk-drawn hopscotch squares, roots spanning time so the fingers of our youth can stretch—and then touch—for just one fleeting moment. So let us be caught between worlds, childhood alleyways blurred into the pavement beneath our feet like tinny laughter played back on old cassettes. Our memories are always kaleidoscoping into fragments even as they crystallize into identity. The sound of a metal can kicked down a street is often the sound that resonates most deeply. That echoes most true. Each time it comes, I realize I have been waiting all along, listening with my cheek pressed to the asphalt.
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by Sarah Conlisk
on william kim solo show
minimum two ideally never
2024
Possibly the best–– and certainly the only graceful — way to experience Minimum Two, Ideally Never is to get on your butt and scoot around the floor. “Scoot”, is a verb that, if it feels you have aged out of, is the perfect introduction to the other verbs present in the scene: the balloons dangle, the bikes snuggle, the legs amble, one scooters reclines on another, photos are poured over, confetti somersaults through words, birds hideout above it all. Verbs that remind your body - even more than your mind - of what it was once like as a child to exist in the world.Remembering how it used to be via objects is hardly a new practice. That’s archeology, whose formal definition - “the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture” - is a reasonable analogy for Kim’s approach to their dig site, the street, where relics of children’s past are plucked, dusted off, and examined for insight. Bikes and balloons are Kim’s blunted arrowheads and broken pottery, doodling a historical record of “play”. And despite archeology’s formal perch on the ivory tower, it’s a widely beloved and personal practice. All of us have wandered through antique stores and sifted through old photographs, learning from and taking comfort in the “what once was” objects. Look at this! I wonder what it used to be. Can you believe your hair back then? Archeology generally exists on the upside, suspending one in the warm glow of remember when. But Kim is no archeologist– Kim is an artist, and excavation is just the first step. After that, the familiar objects are altered and reconfigured to new forms, extending the material record into a conceptual one. The concept in question: companionship. A quick glance around the room, you’ll notice there are very few soloists in the show, with most objects performing in duets and occasionally choruses. In every instance, they are defined by their relationship to their partner(s): Consider, for instance, if there was just one bike— it would look random, ridiculous, out of place. Or if there was just one person sitting on the rock — well then, the back might as well be another rock. By themselves, these objects do not demand interrogation. But once there are multiple, we are quick to anthropomorphize a relationship, and the infinity that exists within it.Kim asks “What did it mean to be a child, amongst others?”–– and the obvious follow up for any no-longer-child: “Do I want that back? Is that even possible?” From afar, you might think you know the answer. Kim’s selection of objects triggers a quick nostalgia – you miss the companioned activities of childhood. Of course. We all do.
But scoot closer.Upon inspection, you see that two bikes are mangled, made defunct by their insistence on being a unit. Two scooters, likewise caught in a perpetual tug of war, insist against each other, going nowhere. Twelve yellow balloons queue up with uniform saccharine grins, static, ever threatened from pigeon repelling spikes just below. In one photograph, a table with two chairs sits vacant, aloof in their knowledge that no one person would dare sit there, alone. In another, two backs sit atop a rock, less than an inches from each other but never– no never–– touching, in accordance with, of course, no homo. Meanwhile, in a video, a pair of legs adopts a can to punt alongside, always on the verge of leaving it behind. And above, two pigeons angle towards each other, while another sits a little way off, in an unmistakable formation: exclusion. The effect is to usher in a new roster of verbs, with more sinister connotations: “retreat”, “struggle”, “conform”, “leer”, “depend”, “taunt” and “ostracize”. What is this dark underbelly Kim sees? What business does it have in our favorite practice of nostalgia? Like all things, it depends on perspective. Now lower yourself to the floor and look from there. Maybe the bikes have returned to snuggling. The backs are now rigid in the tender awkwardness of new love, early dates. The balloons brace together, as if on a roller coaster, reveling in the thrill of danger below. Consumed together, it feels that Kim is taking on therapy’s darling: the “Yes, And…” approach. Childhood is happy and you have no freedom. Friendships are comforting and can be stunting. To remain young, and in groups, is to be frozen in the amber of “pre-individuality”. Things are easier this way. Verbs like “hustle” or “fail” are nowhere to be found. But it leaves you in a state of perpetual dependance–– when life happens, it is routed through others. Your interiority dries up. Of course, you don’t need to be concerned by this. Dependency is not necessarily, or even often, a bad thing. Same with conformity. But it is part of the package we tend to forget. Archeology can help locate this package. But it might take an artist to remind us what’s inside.In conversation, Kim has noted that they like when the sun slides behind a cloud and all at once, everything becomes ominous. They also like the moment on a frozen pond when you crack through the ice— the fear!—only to land, and come to be held, by the layer of ice that lived just below. Our lives are spent casting and recasting the same relationships in different lighting, from different vantage points. What a privilege when we can remember that it is only ever temporary.
William Kim
Artist Statement
｡o○♡(✿◠‿◠)(＾◡＾ ).｡.:♡
* I found this passage in my diary - March 2024
hey
…
go play
be juvenile
tell after the city
street-cast ur stories
eavesdrop outdoors
treasure hunt
the city
…
build poetic playgrounds
belong to daydreams
ephemeral
intimacy
…
belong but not to items
borrow items
from the street
and childhood
memory
…
be a kid be a poet
screenwriter who dwells inside nostalgia
who narrates featherlight tales with in-depth feelings
who counteracts the monumental
who lives but all for the tale
in the ephemeral
…
* my practice records my decision to refrain from a fixed living space*