Meet Kangmin Lim | Visual Artist & Educator

We had the good fortune of connecting with Kangmin Lim and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Kangmin, what habits do you feel play an important role in your life?
I still love writing and drawing on paper. By organizing my goals and schedule on a daily basis, it’s easier for me to make a priority and complete the to-do list in order. Like other artists, I tend to overthink and it’s hard to do things efficiently when thoughts are tangled in my mind and attack me as a huge anxiety ball. Writing and drawing mind map has been my way to survive overwhelming state of mind as an independent artist, a working alien dealing with visa, art school international student, a daughter, a plant owner, and many more. It’s also inspiring to check my old diaries, as it reminds me of how I was doing at the moment, whether it be positive or negative. It’s like looking at a photo album but with handwritings and doodles. Using digital planner can be enough and easy, but I personally like to use physical planner, there’s something therapeutic about being able to hold and touch my plans. It’s also a great excuse to buy bunch of cute stickers and pens to decorate my planner like my second sketchbook!

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
As a shy and quiet person, creating has been my way of self-expression since I was a kid. I started doodling cartoon characters all the time as a kid because it was pleasant to draw something similar to what I enjoyed watching without thinking much. Eventually, I started drawing about reflections of my feeling and perspective on a personal and social issues. One thing that i was specifically interested was the idea of ‘self-consciousness’ and how our dreams show them. I liked sleeping because having a weird random dreams were fascinating, it was like watching a fantasy movie but about myself and sometimes I was even able to control them as I often had lucid dreams. Naturally, my body of work has focused on dreams and I used my dream journals as a main resources for my undergraduate thesis.

‘ZZZ’ series consist of watercolor drawings based on dream journal, and a 24minutes long experimental animations completed in 2018. My pieces explores the borderlands of consciousness and home through dream. Using a mix of traditional and digital mediums to create imaginary worlds, I combined personal experiences and social issues such as racism, misogyny, homophobia, familism, and social pressures in East Asian culture. In my work students in school uniforms float above the sea with chairs and desks while taking an exam. Some of them try to escape and swim to land. I ask the audience to take a closer look at these details and create their own responses based on their individual interpretations of these unusual scenes composed with the tangled dream fragments. The harmony and distortion between the traditional and digital mediums also question the boundaries of different dimensions and concepts to express ideas of unconsciousness and home. I was able to do my first solo exhibition featuring this series as a part of my BFA thesis.

After making a series of weird experimental animations, I wanted to learn digital animation and film-making professionally. Luckily, I got into a graduate school where I learned about computer arts more in depth and created many short clips and and character-based narrative film. Under the Dark Clouds is a 2D mixed-media fantasy animation about visiting a dream world. It uses digitally hand-drawn character animation with watercolor stop-motion and crayon drawings as a background. The Main character, Stra, tends to sleep when she wants to escape from reality. One of the main characters, Beddy, lets Stra enter a dream world, where Stra faces herself and accepts her depression. This film addresses the idea of self-acceptance, and how dreams reflect our unconsciousness. UDFC won some awards including Student Design category from Los Angeles Animation Festival and has selected to more than 30 film festivals all around the world including; Warsaw Animation Film Festival(Poland), 8th Canlandıranlar(Turkey), Palm Springs Int. Animation Festival(CA), and Siggraph MetroCAF(NY).

I had 6 really busy school years just tried my best to learn and absorb as much as I can, from painting to creative coding and fabrications, but I had hard time deciding what to do for my career path as I was interested in so many things. There were things I could potentially do, such as motion graphics, and things I really enjoyed doing, which was visual development for 2d shows. Covid happened when I graduated, and thankfully there was lots of webinars from big studios which I was able to learn about pipeline of the animated series and how the industry works. I was really interested in background designer position, but eventually learned that animation industry is very competitive, so I started doing freelance gigs as a 2D animator and animated for some music videos while developing my portfolio over and over. Eventually, I was lucky enough to work for Bento Box Entertainment and worked on a show such as Mulligan, Paradise PD, and The Prince as a prop and background designer. My experience working at a big production company was very meaningful, but I also had to face a hiatus, which is very common to experience if you are in the animation industry as it is a gig-based industry. However, I needed to work consistently to stay in The States and was struggling every day to find a new gig with a visa sponsorship. There was a few times that I couldn’t take an offer because of visa, which was very devastating. I was not only looking for an animation gig, but also teaching opportunities. I’ve been always interested in teaching and being a part of academic was one of my big goals as an artist. Columbus College of Art & Design was looking for an assistant professor in animation department, which was very appealing to me but I thought I was disqualified by my own standards, but as I was very desperate at the moment, I applied to almost everything that I could including this opening. I was also in process of ‘waiting to interview’ for a big studio gig, but it was very slow. Surprisingly, I got the offer from CCAD and started teaching from 2023 spring semester. I’ve been blessed with my amazing colleagues and students and very thankful for what I’ve accomplished so far and can’t wait to learn more.

Currently, I’m mostly focusing on teaching while also consistently learning new things. In a free time, I’m working on my next film, which will be an experimental animation about myself, updating a life-size self portrait drawing that I did in 2016. Just like how I started animation, I came back to traditional paper animation using camera station and Dragonframe and it’s been super fun and I’m very excited to experiment as I go and complete it hopefully later this year and showcase on film festivals. I also want to work on the dream journal drawing series again someday.. still so much to work on!

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I’ve lived in many cities so far and I have recommendations for each city (if that’s okay!)

For my hometown, Busan, South Korea, I recommend Gwangalli beach and eat fresh sashimi from fish market while watching night ocean view.

For my second hometown, Seoul, South Korea, I recommend going to Mangwon Market, grab some snacks, and go to Han river park.

For New York, I recommend doing a museum tour, Met, MOMA, Guggenheim, New Museum, Brooklyn Museum,.. you do need a few days to complete this but it’s so worth it.

For Atlanta, I enjoyed going to Chamblee Antiques and Interiors for antique shopping and so many authentic Korean restaurants in Duluth, GA which is 30min drive from downtown.

For my current city, Columbus, OH, I recommend going to Columbus Zoo and say hi to cute manatees and giraffes, go for a walk in Franklin park, and go to Tensuke Market and get some delicious asian snacks.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
There’s countless people/community I want to shoutout to. I’m very grateful for two art schools I went to, CCAD(Columbus,OH) and SVA(NY,NY), for providing many helpful resources and connections that inspired me to keep improve and broaden my perspective of professional art world. Shout out to Bento Box Entertainment Atlanta for letting me be a part of their amazing production team and put my name on 4 animated shows that’s on Netflix and MAX. I want to thank CCAD again for having me as an assistant professor and letting me learn again by teaching many great young artists. I’m also very grateful for my favorite directors, musicians, writers, and any creatives, who gave me the boost to go on whenever I was having a hard time and wanted to give up. Lastly, shout out to my family for all the support and friends in Korea for still keeping a great friendship with me, despite the fact that I’m literally on the opposite side of the earth and would send a random meme 5 in the morning.

Website: https://kangminlim.com

Instagram: https://instagram.com/kangminlim_art

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kangminlim95/

Other: https://vimeo.com/eccstramin https://www.imdb.com/name/nm12799404/