Bumin Kim is originally from South Korea and received her MFA in Drawing and Painting in 2015 from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. In 2017, she was awarded at the 30th annual international competition and exhibition Materials: Hard + Soft. Her work has been exhibited at numerous institutions and art fairs, including Art Miami and Pulse Art Fair (Miami, FL); Dallas Art Fair (Dallas, TX); Art Aspen (Aspen, CO); San Francisco Art Fair (San Francisco, CA); Art Market Hamptons Fine Art Fair (Water Mill, NY); and Texas Contemporary Art Fair (Houston, TX).
Kim’s work has been featured in New American Paintings, Fresh Paint Magazine, and Glasstire, and is included in public and private collections across the United States, South Korea, Japan, and Europe. She completed an artist residency at Facebook’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, in 2020, and her work was selected for exhibition at the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon, in 2022. In 2025, her work was acquired by the Art Museum of Texas in Sugar Land.
Bumin Kim acknowledges the transformative power of materiality at play, and has repurposed the context of thread and string to emphasize the energy, delicacy, and grace of painting and drawing. Both the weight of the line as thin and singular, and the collection of lines en masse, as solid form, are tools which Kim uses to build complex forms that vibrate just above the surface. Kim’s intricate manipulation of materials highlights her ability to challenge the traditional model of what a painting should be. Brushstrokes become thread and string, and the flat surface is liberated to breathe into three-dimensional space. This echoes the charged expanse between the earth and skies in North Texas, where subtle hues and solid forms dissolve into immaterial prisms of flowing color.