CLASSIC BEAUTY BLENDED IN FLORAL WALLPAPER #3 by artist Lydia Moon Hee Kim

Acrylic on wood, 10" x 10" (25.40 x 25.40 cm).

Background: I was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea. Most of my memories of childhood are in black and white. The street signs were black and white, photographs were B/W, buildings, people’s shabby clothing, bare mountains, B/W newspapers for street food packing and so on...

In the1960s and 1970s South Korea was a developing nation and Koreans then didn't have the fancy colorful life like Koreans do today. Until 1980, the Korean government didn't allow the nation to sell color TV sets nor broadcast in color, even though Korea already had an assembly line creating color TVs and had the ability to broadcast in color.

My family and I would watch shows and films in B/W like other Koreans and on the weekends, we would watch B/W Westerns. Watching TV was our family time together after a long day and we learned about Western culture and their ideas of beauty through B/W films.

Therefore, my ideas of beauty were created and shaped in black and white. In these two paintings I overlap these B/W memories and my current life.

My black and white memories may not the most pleasant, but they are the most precious to me.