Video transcript
ARTEXPRESS 2024 - Student interview - 04. Gyeongsoo Lim

GYEONGSOO LIM: Hi, my name is Gyeongsoo Lim, and I studied visual arts at Homebush Boys High School.

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My body of work explores my family's cultural background, which is Korean, and the memories I have built whenever I visited them overseas. What really inspired me was my grandparents when they showed me Korean traditional activities overseas and the traditional snacks I enjoyed overseas as well, which I really wanted to remember as I grow older.

So my first time I went Korea was when I was around in Year 2, and it would be my first experience seeing-- or first time experiencing snow and different weathers and different cultures. As shown in my artworks, the busy streets and the very traditional houses I also visited really mean a lot to me.

My artwork is a series of 5 paintings and a sugar lift print. Firstly, I would sketch out all the houses, apartments I lived in and the streets I visited overseas, and then my painting gradually became more layered and layered with more paint. I would have included lots of tones, shades. And as you can see, my artworks are all monochromatic, which was a part of my idea to show the key memories.

For my paintings, I would use loads of different-sized paint brushes and also different-sized panel knives, which would create a rough texture on my buildings, which really complemented my painting style, which is very semi-abstract. And I wanted my artwork to be a little more dreamlike because of my memories from Korea. They are also very dreamlike as well.

The blurred figures on my green panel really shows the idea of movement. When I was younger when I visited, I would live in more traditional houses shown in my artworks. And then when I would visit around 10 years later, I would have moved into more apartments where the Korean culture would have changed a little bit.

As you can see on my artworks, my final step was to pour resin on top of the explosion-like figures, which was to make the explosion pop out to catch someone's attention.

My main inspiration for the body of work was William Turner, and he's also a landscape artist where his artworks are very surreal and dreamlike. And I wanted to incorporate this same idea to my artworks, where my memories from Korea were also dreamlike, which was similar to his process.

Me and my art teacher were very close. We would have lots of after-school discussions, and he really inspired me to more deepen my understanding of painting and drawing and basically my whole artmaking process.

So art has definitely guided me into different pathways such as architecture, which I am very interested in. And there are also many different courses other people can choose through art as a pathway to the future.

My advice for future Year 12 students would be to connect deeply with your cultural background and find who you are as an identity, which relates back to your family history.

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