The Christopher Cutts Gallery is excited to introduce Toronto-based painter, Shinae Kim! The artist’s first major solo exhibition, “Star Light, Star Bright,” presents a collection of captivating narrative compositions.
Kim’s sublime tableaux are sensorial experiences of whimsical memories, reimagined mythologies, and personal folklore. Kim composes her paintings as if they were chapters from a story told at twilight, each canvas conjuring worlds of heroines, gods, and forces of nature, shaped from recollection and reinvention. Referencing iconic imagery and characters, she carefully untangles subjects from their canonical contexts and releases them into abstracted, chromatic dreamscapes.
Take Scheherazade, referring to the narrator of “One Thousand and One Nights.” Scheherazade forestalls her fate by weaving tales of heroes, lovers, kings, and mystical jinn. Scheherazade never appears as the protagonist of her stories but acts as the narrative’s cohesive consciousness, her imagination binding disparate tales into one. Her brilliant storytelling saves her life and, in turn, delivers a collection of tales that are still told today. Like Scheherazade, Kim understands narrative as enchantment. She doesn’t place herself at the center of her compositions, but the artist’s hand, her persisting palette, and distinct visual vernacular saturate them.
Kim whimsically reimagines art historical references, classical figures drifting free of their original allegories. Venus and Bacchus, once tethered to myths of love and excess, become participants in Kim’s choreographies of colour. In La mer, women gather around a body of water, diving and reclining in leisure or in ritual. Perhaps referencing Naiads or deities of the seas, or perhaps referencing Haenyeo, the real-life woman divers of Jeju, whose matriarchal, independent spirit and tradition have sustained their community for centuries.
Kim is a master of colour, using it as her primary medium and subject. For her, colour carries narrative. Her blues plunge viewers into her memories of the waters along the Mexican coast, and her botanical greens reference memories of her mother’s garden.
From Arabian nights to Greek myth, from the salt-laced air of distant shores to the familiarity of childhood memories, Kim leads us across a constellation of worlds. Like the titular “Star Light, Star Bright,” this exhibition unfolds as a nostalgic lullaby as viewers find themselves suspended in Kim’s sublime, dreamlike landscapes of saturated colour and sweeping brushstrokes. Shinae Kim leaves us in anticipation of another dawn, another composition, another narrative waiting to be told.
Join us on Saturday, February 21, from 2 to 6 pm for the opening reception! The artist will be in attendance.
Shinae Kim’s “Star Light, Star Bright” will run from February 21 — March 14, 2026.