David Young Kim

The red thread in much of my work is the special attention I pay to art theoretical writing and the confrontation of images and texts, and beyond that, to the mechanics of language as the art historian’s primary tool. The questions that organize my thinking include: how does writing frame engagement with the work of art, and by extension, how is the world able to disclose itself to the linguistic self—or selves—through art?

Given the capaciousness of language as an art historical medium, I have an admittedly eclectic range of research and teaching interests, from Italian “Renaissance” painting, to colonial “Latin American” visual culture, to art historiography, where these categories of periodization and geography were first formulated, and debated. On this score, I have become increasingly attentive to the history, politics, and possibilities of formalism in art history in addition to theories of language and translation.

More recently, I have been experimenting with developing ideas in another form—the film essay—outside the art historian’s traditional purview.  Film offers another means of thinking through and with the material, in the same way that attention to language in art historical analysis leads to engagement with the language of art historiography. Through these experimental films, I explore what a largely visual expressive mode can contribute to thinking about visual art through a fundamentally nonverbal medium.