Heesoo Kim returns to Unit with an exhibition of new works, Normal Life – Cliché. The series of paintings and sculptures continues Kim’s sensitive exploration of the human condition through portraiture, as he turns his gaze towards the idea of clichés; those well-worn, everyday expressions of life; phrases and gestures that are so often repeated they risk losing meaning. However for Kim, clichés are not empty. Rather, they are vessels of truth: familiar words and moments that carry us through life when all else feels uncertain.
Normal Life – Cliché is not a rejection of feeling, but a reaffirmation of it. In a world that often chases after the extraordinary, Kim reminds us that what sustains us is usually what’s right in front of us: love, connection, grief, hope. These sentiments aren’t grand performances, but quiet truths, repeated endlessly. And in that repetition, they become real.
“Lately I’ve been realising that “the cliché” – things that are so close to life that we almost forget that they’re there – is actually what’s most important. Throughout the past three to four months, I’ve been trying to focus on the natural, most routine things in both my daily life and practice. So I’ve painted lovers resting together in bed.”
Heesoo Kim
Untitled (Couple in Blue)
2025
130 x 97 cm
Heesoo Kim
Untitled (Couple I)
2025
90.9 x 72.2 cm
Heesoo Kim
Untitled (Couple II)
2025
90.9 x 72.2 cm
Heesoo Kim
Untitled (Couple III)
2025
90.9 x 72.2 cm
Heesoo Kim
Untitled (Sculpture I)
2025
70 x 31 x 31 cm
Heesoo Kim
Untitled (Sculpture Pair)
2025
85 x 85 x 35 cm
“Normal Life - Cliché began out of the need to focus on the act of drawing and painting itself. When I first began painting, I needed to practice as much as possible. This framework gave me the freedom to choose subjects that felt close and real. I thought, let’s draw what my friends and I are seeing and feeling right at this moment.”
Heesoo Kim
Untitled (Hope)
2025
21 x 14.8 cm
Heesoo Kim
Untitled (I Dance)
2025
21 x 14.8 cm
Heesoo Kim
Untitled (Cliché)
2025
21 x 14.8 cm
Heesoo Kim
Untitled (Find What You Love)
2025
21 x 14.8 cm
After a recent health scare, Kim paints with a sharpened sense of life’s finitude. His brush with mortality has thrown the often unappreciated aspects of human life – love, family, friendship – into stark relief. This sounds cliché, but that is Kim’s point. It is precisely these familiar notes that build the melody of living.
His new body of work pares everything back to let those fundamentals resonate. Anonymous figures exist in planes of muted tones, and as his style continues to mature he is unafraid to let his compositions work with more empty space than detail, as though pausing for breath. By stripping each subject of identity, Kim invites the viewer to step in, to feel how the ordinary gathers weight when time suddenly feels limited. The repetition of small gestures — an arm around a shoulder, a lingering gaze — become quiet memento mori and celebrations simultaneously.
This heightened awareness of life’s fragility also fuels Kim’s determination to keep painting “without retirement.” He imagines a studio that ages alongside him, canvases accumulating like the rings of a tree with each layer another humble attempt to honour the essential, everyday emotions that refuse to fade.
Kim’s roots in photography inform his painterly approach. Moments in his works feel paused, suspended, as though glimpsed through a lens. He draws on years of journal entries and personal notes – short lines capturing fleeting sensations, passing doubts, or moments of sudden clarity. These quiet reflections become the foundation for his portraits, which often feature figures caught mid-gesture. Such details suggest the emotional residue of ordinary life – the stuff that clichés are made of.
What might at first seem banal or repetitive becomes, in Kim’s hands, profoundly human. By refusing to title his works, he resists final interpretation, instead offering viewers a moment of emotional recognition that is theirs to complete. “I believe that it is in the artist’s karma to fill what is void, to make whole what is incomplete,” Kim says – a sentiment that runs through the heart of this exhibition.
“I don’t want to retire. I want to keep painting even in my seventies and eighties.”
Exhibition Essay
Heesoo Kim: On (Re)Discovering the Ordinary
Biography
Heesoo Kim (b. 1984) received his BFA from KONKUK University, Seoul, and worked in photography before painting. His artistic practice hones in on what it is to be human, isolating universal human experiences through bold portraiture.
Today, Kim is a pioneering artist who has had solo exhibitions with Herald Gallery, Gallery Kabinett, Everyday Mooonday and D Museum in Seoul. Kim followed up his first solo exhibition on Unit’s Voices platform in 2021 with his highly successful solo exhibitions, Normal Life, exhibited with Unit in 2023 and 2024. In 2023, Kim held a solo exhibition titled Monologue, with Everyday Mooonday, Seoul, South Korea. His work has been featured in various international publications including Juxtapoz and Hypebeast.
Kim’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Lian Foundation, Geneva, Switzerland, Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, USA, Sagol Family Collection.
Chosen Charity
Conservation International
Since 1987, Conservation International has worked to spotlight and secure the critical benefits that nature provides to humanity.
Combining fieldwork with innovations in science, policy and finance, Conservation International has helped protect more than 6 million square kilometres of land and sea across more than 70 countries.
