Smack Mellon presents Spiked Garden, a site-specific installation of drawings by New York-based artist Mie Yim. The works on display started during lockdown when Yim, like many artists, was forced to work at home and away from the spacious studio that permitted her to create paintings at a larger scale. Under these conditions, Yim landed on a limited method of working that allowed for her imagery to flow, directly and unmediated, outward to the page: color pastels on various shades of Shinzen paper, 11.5 x 9 inches in size. This perfect combination of materials and scale allowed for the conduit between brain and hand to become immediate and clear–without overthinking, her hand could act first.
More than studies, these drawings are her muses. As such, something feels undeniable and true about the works and how they come to be. They do not perform “image” for anyone, having reached a state of fully gestated gesticulation through the dispersed agency of her mark-making. The drawings are dark, delightful, and strange, each imbued with its own life essence. Within these worlds, the darkness necessarily coexists with levity, humor, the abject, and the banal aspects of existence—both physically and metaphysically–while defying the discreteness of categorization that binds the human world. What is clear is that the works represent interiorities: bodily, neurological, emotional, cellular, and that which comes before language.
Previously in her career, Mie Yim’s paintings were more loosely representational, depicting fluffy bears and bunnies, speaking in part to her experience as an Asian American artist. Over time, her work has moved further into the realm of abstraction, exploding the pictorial space in order to go deeper inside. Beneath the colorful and the cute lies decay, revealing spaces that speak to all scales: microscopic, architectural, environmental, and bodily. Extending the metaphor of the garden in the exhibition’s title, these drawings are the root and core of Yim’s practice, which allows the rest to flourish.
Mie Yim (b. 1963, S. Korea) is a New York City based painter. Solo exhibitions include Pace University, Simone Subal Gallery, Olympia Gallery, all in New York, NY; Inna Art Space in Hangzhou, China; Villa Magdalena, San Sebastian, Spain; Scott Miller Projects, Birmingham, AL; Basel Social Club at the Beverly Holz, Basel, Switzerland; Villa Magdalena with Galeria Mascota, CDMX, Mexico; The Durst Foundation in New York, NY; Ground Floor Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Lehmann Maupin, New York, NY; Michael Steinberg, New York, NY; and Gallery in Arco, Turin, Italy. She had a solo exhibition at Brattleboro Museum in Brattleboro, Vermont in 2022. Numerous group exhibitions include Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Seoul, KR; Unit, London, UK; Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China; Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Canada Gallery, the Drawing Center, Feature, Ise Cultural Foundation, Mitchell Algus Gallery, BRIC, Mark Borghi Gallery, all in New York. Other places such as Johnson County Community College, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta, The Arts Center at Western Conn. University. She represented a solo booth at NADA 2021 with Olympia and a three-person presentation at Untitled 2021 with Monica King Projects. She is a recipient of Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant in 2020, The Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant 2018, The New York Foundation of the Arts Painting Fellowship in 2021 & 2015, and Artist in the Marketplace, Bronx Museum. She has been awarded Sharpe Walentas Studio Residency, Brooklyn, NY; Yaddo Artist Residency, Saratoga Springs, NY; Public Collections include JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, New York, NY; Nelsons Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; and Chambers Hotel, New York, NY. She has a BFA in Painting from Philadelphia College of Art as well as a year abroad at Tyler School of Art in Rome, Italy.
Image: Installation view, Mie Yim, “Spiked Garden,” 2025. Image courtesy Smack Mellon. Photo by Etienne Frossard.
This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, New York City Council Member Lincoln Restler, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, Robert Lehman Foundation, Select Equity Group Foundation, many individuals and Smack Mellon’s Members.
Smack Mellon’s programs are also made possible with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and with generous support from The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of The New York Community Trust, Jerome Foundation, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Wolf Kahn Foundation, Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Inc, The Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation, and an Anonymous Donor.
In-kind donations and services are provided by Materials for the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs/NYC Department of Sanitation/NYC Department of Education and Sage and Coombe Architects.
Space for Smack Mellon’s programs is generously provided by the Walentas family and Two Trees Management.
