I am confused? What is it and who am I?

I (Kim) am a  medium young person living in San Diego and trying my best to be in this world in a way that feels right for me and has a net positive impact on the people I encounter.

I want to understand connection: how is it that we connect with others, and how can we understand each other better? I am interested in trying to depict complex, painful emotions on neutral faces: grief, loss, fear, alienation, loneliness. When we recognize this pain in others, we can connect with them more deeply, because it shows us that we are all the same. When we recognize this, the deepest loneliness changes into the deepest connection — the sense of seeing and being seen. I want to elicit that feeling when you look at my portraits.

Sometimes it is hard for me to connect with myself. It often feels easier to express my feelings through other people’s quoted words, even if the quotes are just short fragments applied in a different context. In the same way, I feel more able to express my own emotions through portraits of others, with my own emotions reflected on their faces. In this way, each of my portraits is a self portrait, because while I paint someone, I feel like I am inside them. 

Every day, I try to understand more about the people around me. It is very hard for me to do this, and it feels very sad sometimes, but it provides me with unparalleled moments of beauty. I want to show you how it feels to be confronted with the simultaneous stabbing and confronting emotions of beauty and pain all at once. Though life is full of immense pain, it is also so deeply, cruelly wonderful, so incredibly sharply gorgeous, and full of love.