April 19–May 31, 2025
Marta's new home in Silver Lake has the feel—corrugated steel, Corten, concrete floor—of a Hollywood backlot or soundstage. The New York–based Korean artist, Minjae Kim, transforms the space accordingly: toward the back-right quarter of the gallery, two conjoined walls suggest a domestic structure, partitioning the space theatrically into “indoor” and “outdoor.” Nearby, a quirky, precarious palm tree signals Kim’s intention: to distill the essence of Los Angeles into a single scene. An off-kilter assortment of functional design objects, sculptures, and installation works are the players on his stage.
The show is titled after the internet-famous mountain lion P-22 (or “Puma #22”) who lived for a decade in LA’s vast, semi-wild Griffith Park, in which tourists and residents alike hike to the Hollywood Sign, play golf, ride horses, recreate. A sculpture of P-22 (Mountain Lion (P_22), 2025) is one of the more arresting and directly referential works in the show: a lithe, nearly life-size sculpture in wood, plaster,and resin of a cat whose uneven finish gives it a world-weary mien. Mountain Lion (P_22) cuts an especially elegiac figure, a ghostly sort-of metonym for the city as whole, hollowed out by the still-fresh trauma of destruction and displacement. The cat in question was famously euthanized in 2022 when examinations revealed he was suffering from traumatic injuries consistent with an automobile collision—a distinctly Angeleno fate.
Speaking of automobiles, another of the more allusive sculptural works is Illusion, Sister of Icarus (After Rodin’s work of same title) (2025), a spectral interpretation of a ’20s-era Model T Ford, rendered in Kim’s signature semi-translucent resin-coated quilted fiberglass and balanced on industrial casters. Kim’s quilting technique achieves something approaching alchemy, rendering architectural a medium that is inherently soft. The motor mascot—the small figurine perched at the prow—is an abstracted interpretation of Rodin’s 1895 sculpture of a nude winged female, colliding head-first with the Earth; an allegory of hubris.
In light of the devastating fires in Los Angeles this past winter, Kim’s coded messages read as a conflicted threnody. Angelenos, in effect, have built their homes too close to the sun. Los Angeles has always been a city in denial of itself. Out of a mostly arid landscape, orange groves and then a sprawling city eventually arose. There’s not enough water, enough shelter, enough clean air to sustain its population of 13 million—and yet, the wheels (and the reels) keep turning. The show must go on.
“Phantom-22” is, in part, an homage to the industry, and specifically to Buster Keaton’s silent film One Week. Kim’s installation of a Jean Prouvé–esque louvred wall of fiberglass is a nod to the house that Keaton’s character attempts to build from a prefab kit, only to be repeatedly foiled by sabotage, extreme weather, and general misfortune. The deranged house he creates—in a slapstick film made in 1920—amounts to a perfect postmodern confection, something you wouldn’t be surprised to see in LA’s Venice or Downtown neighborhoods, replete with rhombus windows, doors to nowhere, and an undulate roof. But beyond the uncanny vernacular consonances, it’s the Hollywood titan’s sense of humor that finds kinship in Kim’s practice. Kim's fondness for visual puns, one-liners, and tongue-in-cheek gestures is apparent equally in a pair of figurines, standing apart from the crowd under a pendant lamp, entitled Sybil and Buster (after Keaton and his costar Sybil Seely) and in his mixed media sculpture Skunk (2025), whose tail is raised, poised to spray. The animal’s body is so (deliberately) crudely rendered in foam and epoxy that at first I read the thing as purely abstract. Only when I knelt could I discern its form. “It stinks to high heaven,” I caught myself thinking.
In the “indoor” space, which is to say, on the other side of the fiberglass wall, Kim has arranged a table and four chairs (each slung with a canvas back like a director’s), three ethereal lamps of different sizes, a bar and stools, a cabinet and a bench. On an elegant, partially lacquered sapele and ash table, a collection of more than two dozen small clay figurines read, fleetingly, as a chess set (an object Kim has previously iterated). These terracotta-colored miniatures are the archetypes of LA: the Venice Beach fitness freak, the unhoused street-dweller, the guy on his phone, the skater, the food delivery robot. Kim deftly balances an absence of self-seriousness with more existential themes—the uncomfortable disequilibrium of natural and manmade environments that is endemic to life in this city.
Though Kim bounces between wood, resin, illustration, fiberglass, painting, architecture, aluminum, epoxy, etc.—and shimmies frictionlessly from “functional design” to “art” and back—his distinctive facture comes across in every medium. His moves are assured, consummate even; his forms poetic without straining. I can’t think of many artists who seem so unvexed by the zeitgeist and the aesthetic super-spreading of viral internet culture. Which is not to say that Kim is ignorant of the designers and artists whose work clearly informs his own, but that he synthesizes these diverse influences into objects and environments that feel wholly original. This show is ambitious, in scale, in scope, and in form, but Kim never flies too close to the sun.