Calvin Kim ‘23 Celebrates the Liminal at Harper’s Apartment
Visual Arts alum Calvin Kim ’23 opened his second solo exhibition, Departure Before Arrival, on April 30, 2025, at Harper’s Apartment in New York City. The paintings may be viewed by appointment only until June 14.
The title, Departure Before Arrival, signals the exhibition’s affinity for liminal spaces. Many of the paintings in the collection appear as if an afterglow. Skies feature heavily throughout Kim’s works, and he often uses shadows and moonlight to capture moments of day and night, time as something that is returned to and yet never repeated.
In the exhibition at Harper’s Apartment, an outpost of the Harper’s galleries dedicated to contemporary art on the Upper East Side, If the moon is full we’re just fools is displayed, a tiny aurora borealis, between two of the largest paintings in the collection. Keeping, on its left side, is red, total like an eclipse, with clouds in the sky and lightning like veins running through the painting's two big hands. Held between the hands’ two thumbs is a wilting daisy, pulled out by its roots. The day was over before the sky was older, on the right side of the wall, is one of the collection’s works that gives the impression of a photo negative, or the image on the back of your eyelids when you close them.
“Throughout Departure Before Arrival, Kim directs his gaze towards transitional terrains,” Harper’s Apartment wrote in the press release for the exhibition. “The beaming works that comprise this exhibition illuminate ephemeral scenes—imagined landscapes at the threshold of subtle transformation. The artist constructs worlds charged with tension like one would in a poem, through expressive arrangements of fragmented imagery.”
Kim’s last exhibition, Soft Pangs, was his debut, at Situations Gallery in New York City. Its paintings could be the starting point, within a dream, that Departure Before Arrival builds from and complicates.
Calvin Kim (b. 1992, Los Angeles, CA) received an MFA from Columbia University in 2023, and a combined BFA/BA from Cornell University in 2015. His work has been the subject of solo presentations at SITUATIONS, New York (2024); Future Fair, New York (2024); and POWDERFREEVACUUMSEALED, online (2020). Most recently, Kim has participated in group exhibitions at Harper’s, New York (2024); DeKalb Gallery, New York (2024); Chilli Arts Project, London (2024); Joyce Goldstein Gallery, Chatham, NY (2023); LaiSun Keane, Boston (2023); and Charles Moffett, New York (2023). Reviews of his work have appeared in publications, including Boston Art Review, Korea Times, and New American Paintings. Kim lives and works in New York City, where he has been an artist-in-residence at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts since 2023.