This painting was a project I embarked on five years ago and finally arrived at its end earlier in the pandemic year of 2021. Beginning with the idea of a large scale visual memoir, I wanted to tell the story of the years I spent living in the Mission District of San Francisco, where I started work on a novel. The painting begins in August of 2001 and chronicles eight years in the city, as recounted through images and everyday objects I grew up with as I struggled through the process of writing my novel.
During my time in the city, I was immersed in 1970s exploitation films, inspired by their energy and irreverence. I wanted to bring that same exploitation style to the painting while visually representing the very solitary and lonely process of writing. In this way, the painting reflects a number of contradictions, beginning with the irony of the writing process as both solitary and chaotic. This contradiction extends to the visual experience of “Charms and sorrows’, which is meditative and intimate, while also bawdy in the fashion of cheap, low-budget exploitation films. At 5ft x 48ft, the painting also attempts to be encompassing in the way the theater going experience encompasses the viewer, but rather than passively sitting and watching the action unfold, one walks along and follows the progression of image and action, quietly stepping close to take in the minutiae and slowly stepping back to take in the whole.
I began this project a year after my father’s death and in the process of working on “Charms and sorrows of a process”, my mother fell ill and passed away, followed a few months later by the death of my fiance’. The dates of these losses are stamped in specific sections of the canvas to mark each passing in the five year timeline it took to finish the painting.
Click on the image below to view the painting in full.
SEAN FELIX KIM 