SO YOUN KIM, FRSA livery freeman is a cosmopolitan fine artist who is a cross-disciplinary thinker.
My journey started at the age of 14 when I came abroad with my sister to Canada, under the support of my mother who was a textile design professor and my father who was an engineer CEO of IT company in Seoul. Having grown in a rich cultural upbringing with exposure to Picasso exhibition in Seoul when I was a kid with my mother, great classics with colorful illustrations, and lego making and literature club, my cosmopolitan journey upscaled in Trinity College School, Port Hope, Canada where I immersed myself into western and Canadian friends and circles and learned English with developing artistic talent in my AP art class in grade 11 where I obtained 5 with self-study of Matisse’s seated figures. Having studied international relations in the University of Western Ontario (honors BA degree), Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs (MA degree) in Ottawa, my exposure to international relations with ABD PhD status at University Waterloo’s Balsillie School of International Affairs, all interposed me into academia where I have contemplated about norms, ideas, and global phenomenon such as climate change and public policymaking.
Having relocated to Ottawa for working as a bureaucrat (policy advisor) for the Federal Government of Canada, I had an opportunity to have a solo debut exhibition at Gallery Gora, the renowned local gallery in Montreal’s Sherbrooke Street in 2022. After then, I started to have global exhibition opportunities such as Venice, Italy, London, UK, Matera, Italy, Barcelona, Spain, Paris, France and so on including Tokyo International Art Fair and Future of Humanity Work at Davos, Switzerland during the World Economic Forum. Recently, in addition a membership in British Art Network, I have become the Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) where I had an opportunity to be part of FRSA’s Augmented Society Network in Las Vegas, USA, representation artist in New England Art Center in SOWA Art and Design District in Boston, USA as well as RSA House exhibition in UK. My work and interviews were included in several places such as Penn Journal of Arts and Science, University of Pennsylvenia.
I also serve leadership as part of Board of Governance of Trinity College School as well as president of Norman Paterson School of International Affairs Alumni Association. I have become livery freeman of the Worshipful Company of Painters and Stainers and am waiting for City of London Freemanship from UK in 2026. My approach is deeply cosmopolitan – I connote international affairs, my academic discipline as cultural affairs as everything we talk about is international affairs at this time of globalization – later I connote this to cosmopolitan affairs. Having grown up in cosmopolitan background in trilingualism, Korean, English and French, I aim to expose sophistication of cosmopolitan affairs in visualized forms with concrete expressions of my imaginative and descriptive languages beyond intuitive and improvised artistic practice of abstract expressionism landscape paintings. My inspiration is such as social scientific lenses with reading great classics which are foundational concepts and theories as shaping the global scenes where we live now.
Here are what my collaborators say about my work:
