Sung Hwa Kim: Nowhere Now Here
November 13, 2026 – January 9, 2027
Harper’s Bangkok
Siam Patumwan House, Bangkok, Thailand
Tuesday–Saturday, 11am–7pm
Harper’s is pleased to announce Nowhere Now Here, Brooklyn-based artist Sung Hwa Kim’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in Thailand. The presentation features new paintings that build upon his signature surreal vernacular and opens Friday, November 13, from 6–8pm with a reception attended by the artist.
In Nowhere Now Here, Kim’s painted portals literally and metaphorically draw back the curtain, inviting viewers deeper into his surreal interiors. Building upon earlier works that featured intimate tablescapes anchored by Joseon-dynasty porcelain vessels (‘baekja’), the new paintings transport viewers from one realm to another, using familiar motifs that open onto unfamiliar spaces. Drawing inspiration from René Magritte’s Le savoir (c. 1961), Kim expands his compositions into meticulously arranged interiors where the baekja remain a recurring presence. Magritte’s interplay of opposing states, framed by an open doorway, finds new expression in Kim’s juxtapositions: interior and exterior, day and night, the recognizable and the novel. Urban skylines meet pastoral landscapes, while sunlit rooms open onto star-filled skies, challenging our comprehension of space and time.
The boundaries between Kim’s shifting worlds become increasingly fluid in the new work, seeping beyond the vases and doorways into the rooms around them. Curtain-like planes draw back the very fabric of each universe, revealing further layers within these deceptively complex scenes. Elsewhere, immaculately styled interiors appear suspended within expansive landscapes, their open doors offering glimpses into another reality. The baekja become vessels for imagined worlds, bringing the past into quiet coexistence with the present. Small human figures wander through these shifting environments, their diminutive scale emphasizing the vastness of the spaces they inhabit. Falling petals, transformed into fragments of light, suggest that what appears to be an ending may instead give way to another state of being.
Throughout the exhibition, Kim's compositions balance a sense of domestic familiarity with the infinite possibilities of the unknown. Rather than depicting a fixed place or moment, his paintings invite viewers to reconsider the boundaries of their own perception, where imagination and reality are not necessarily opposing forces, but overlapping states of being. Wherever we find ourselves, even within the most foreign of landscapes, the moment we inhabit is undeniably here.
Sung Hwa Kim (b. 1985, Seoul, South Korea) received a BFA from Art Institute of Boston in 2008, and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2012. Most recently, Kim’s work has been exhibited at Harper’s, New York, Los Angeles, and East Hampton (2026, 2025, 2024, 2023 and 2021); Scroll NYC, New York (2026); Collaborations, Denmark (2026); The Page Gallery, Seoul (2025); David Castillo Gallery, Miami, FL (2024); Art SG, Singapore (2026, 2024); Cob Gallery, London (2023); Everyday Gallery, Antwerp (2023); The Hole, New York (2023); Hesse Flatow, New York (2022 and 2021); Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles (2022); and Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY (2019). His work has appeared in Artsy, ArtMaze Magazine, Whitehot Magazine, and New American Paintings. Kim lives and works in Brooklyn.