Artist | Simon KO, Calvin KIM

Date | Nov 6 to Dec 20, 2025

Room 815, 33 Sichuan Middle Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai

Between dream and wakefulness lies a terrain without a name: a liminal space where time drifts slowly, light carries a humid warmth, and memories hover like mist. It is within this hazy realm that the paintings of Simon Ko and Calvin Kim emerge and recede, oscillating between intimacy and distance. In this exhibition, both artists retreat from grand narratives, turning instead toward more intimate and introspective territories, tracing the unspoken rhythms of desire, waiting, and transformation.

In Simon Ko’s painting, the world no longer obeys the logic of linear storytelling. His compositions are built from fragments and intervals: suspended, unfinished, and delicately incoherent. The figures within them exist independently, breathing, pausing, each carrying unspoken secrets, enveloped in a silence that feels both fragile and vast. These are not imaginary beings but reflections of contemporary selves, individuals caught within folds of time, belonging neither to the past nor the future. They hover between dream and awakening, consumed by the minutiae of daily life yet still seeking order amid disarray.

In Fragments d’un Discours Amoureux (A Lover’s Discourse: Fragment, 1977), Roland Barthes proposed a language of love unbound by system or structure. Through fragmentation, pause, and suspension, he exposed the inner fracture and longing of the contemporary subject. This resonates profoundly in Simon Ko’s practice: the lover endlessly issues a call (l’appel), yet the one being called never arrives; the subject recognizes itself through fragments, yet never arrives at a coherent whole. Within these secluded yet porous spaces, these paintings become an aperture, a site of introspection, offering a quiet invitation to step inward and to feel the unspoken yearning for connection embedded within the ordinary.

Calvin Kim, by contrast, turns his gaze toward sensations on the verge of disappearance, as if capturing the afterglow of dusk or the lingering traces of memory that refuse to fade. His canvases are veiled in translucent hues; each brushstroke seems like a sediment of emotion and time, rubbing and layering to form hazy edges that slowly dissolve into air. Subtle forms hover as if carried by the currents of time itself. Echoing Italo Calvino’s contemplation of “Lightness” in Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), Kim enacts a poetics of resistance through weightlessness: his colors, gestures, and compositions quietly unburden the image - stripping away the density of narrative. What remains is a luminous trace of feeling, shimmering between presence and fading, like a thought halfremembered, or a dream that lingers after waking.

In Kim’s practice, yearning is neither desire nor lack, but an outward-reaching movement of perception, a continual search for what is absent yet deeply felt. A series of envelope paintings in this exhibition visualizes such an atmosphere. The five works unfold like fragments of an unsent letter, addressed to an unreachable elsewhere, holding within them both longing and loss. Across the surfaces, the faint traces of birds and moonlight linger, as if time itself were exhaling upon the canvas, leaving behind its translucent breath.

If Ko’s paintings arise from the fleeting intensity of reality, Kim’s emerge from the echo of dreams. One leans toward the tension of forgetting; the other toward the warmth of remembering. In their coexistence, a subtle resonance unfolds. Branches and birds thread through both bodies of work: the former growing, twisting, and extending like lines of memory; the latter gliding, falling, and vanishing like flashes of thought.

Their practices may be understood as forms of affective painting — not representations of emotion, but atmospheres that generate sensation. As Brian Massumi writes in Parables for the Virtual (2002), affect is intensity before it becomes emotion. Both Ko and Kim’s works dwell in this state of becoming: the threshold where emotion is still raw, tactile, unspoken. The “hazy land” of the exhibition is thus not an escapist dream but a gentle return — to a moment when the body could still feel, when emotions had yet to solidified into language. Here, seeing transforms into a bodily response: a breath held, a gaze lingers, a heart hesitates. We cease to be mere observers and become participants — introspective bodies summoned by the dream itself.

About the Artist

SIMON KO (B.1988, Seoul) currently lives and works in New York and Seoul. He received his Bachelor's degree in Fine Art from The Cooper Union in 2011, and a Master's degree in Fine Art from Yale University in 2017. Through a variety of mediums, he attempts to depict moments in the lives of imagined characters loosely rooted in his personal experiences. By blending elements of autobiography and fiction, he creates paintings, sculptures and installations exploring themes that touch upon notions of yearning, mystery, relationships, and suffering in contemporary life.

CALVIN KIM (B.1992, Los Angeles) currently lives and works in New York City. In 2023, Kim received his M.F.A. in Visual Arts from Columbia University. In 2015, Kim received his B.F.A. and B.A. in Psychology at Cornell University, and was a recipient of the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship to attend Yale Norfolk. Calvin Kim makes paintings and sculptures that engage questions of time, memory, and transformation as they persist within the layers of natural and man-made materials. His paintings often use humor, softness, and stupidity as an emotive stance for the rupturing condition of everyday living with hope and wonder.