“I now began to watch, with a strange interest, the numerous things that floated in our company. I must have been delirious – for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents toward the foam below.”

– “A Descent into the Maelstrom” by E. A. Poe

Recasting cultural presumptions, merging Eastern thought with Western objectivism, fitting a round peg into a square hole, finding that piece of the jig-saw puzzle to complete the image, tweaking language to convey that exact thought, those are some of the challenges Korean-born Mee Kyung Shim confronts with each blank canvas. Weighty parameters indeed for a painter no matter how talented.

Born in Suwon City, near Seoul, Shim’s upbringing was steeped in classical Korean culture, including Buddhism, Taoism and shamanism, elements which figure prominently in her recent work. As part of the first post-war, industrial generation of South Koreans, she benefitted from educational and cultural opportunities not previously afforded to women. Those new-found openings, coupled with a driven mother who encouraged them, helped enable her to pursue her natural instincts for drawing and painting.

After extensive and rigorous studies of both Asian and Western art tradition, Shim earned an undergraduate degree from Duksung University in Seoul. Within a few years she and her husband came to the U.S. and landed in Detroit where each earned graduate degrees from Wayne State University. When he was offered a teaching position in mechanical engineering at IPFW the couple moved here two years ago.

Almost immediately Shim was able to secure studio space at “B” Building section of the old Fort Wayne Art School on East Berry Street where she works virtually all day. It was there, as a stop on the annual Trolley Tour, that her work first caught the eye of Fort Wayne Museum of Art director Patricia Watkinson and curator Robert Schroeder who offered to host her “Wandering the Way” exhibit in the museum’s upstairs Gallery.

“I don’t think there’s a question that Mee’s work is both striking and of high quality,” Schroeder said. “I find it engaging because of its autobiographical themes and the juxtaposition of the two cultures. Art is really all about different contexts and we thought it arrived at an interesting time.”

Later in 2001, Shim put together a show for the Artemisia Gallery in Chicago and the Vorderman Gallery in Roanoke entitled “identity/ideality” and most recently she was a participant in the “Big Drawings” installation at Artlink. Scheduled for later this year are two solo exhibitions at Youngstown State University and at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Currently her work is available for viewing at her studio at 1018 W. Berry Street.

Riddled with references to man’s relationship with nature, the artist also incorporates underlying themes shaped by Taoist ideas and marries them to Western culture via her unique reading of 60s British Pop artists like Peter Blake and R. B. Kitaj. In particular her earliest work reveals debts to the American-born figurative painter Kitaj who, like Shim, often used his heritage as subject matter.

In his case, Kitaj struggled to probe his Jewish background with depictions of socialist-humanists like Isaac Babel and Rosa Luxemburg while Shim wrestles with the mystic symbolism of the Eastern thought she was steeped in all the while admiring the form and power of socialist realism.

Contained in her later works are the telltale signs of Blake (he did the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper cover), where straight ahead portraiture rules.

Strange as it seems to me, it was the exposure to Pre-Renaissance school painting that she first studied in Korea that initially perked Shim’s painterly interests.

“When I saw more of it again in Detroit, I was again taken in by it,” Shim explained. “I find it so interesting, these beginnings of scientific perspective. On the other hand it is often too elegant, too gorgeous” and, of course, so Western, so formal, so objective, so classifiable, so brazenly religious in content (my words, my emphasis).

In a whimsical way Shim plays with the iconic nature of that period in a recent piece where she does a kind of “American Gothic” triptych of Korean peasant farmers, complete with recognizable Gothic arches framing her trio of agrarian hero-subjects.

“When you ask of influences I would have to begin with my mother, for what she did for me,” Shim explained of the philosophies underlying her painting.

“She never had those chances. Her marriage was arranged by my father’s family. It was all very traditional. Yet she has given me so much. In the morning she might pray to the mountain and later to the trees. My grandfather, a farmer, never had a calendar or a watch. He just knew when to plant, tend and harvest by the phases of the moon. I retain much of that and attempt to incorporate it in my work.”

In other earlier and again, in some recent works, Shim makes much use of the element of water – read: more at swimming or submerged searching – as a metaphor for the, and her own, collision of East meets West. As a fish may not be the first to recognize his liquid environment, so too we, as Westerners, may not readily comprehend our image-driven world without coming ashore from time to time to take stock.

Bombarded as we are by the ready-made illuminations of television and advertisements, Shim forces us to reconsider the subliminal and prompts us to substitute a more inward-directed, intuitive – maybe even meditative – understanding of the world around us.

Whether you agree that Shim totally succeeds in getting us to re-examine our place in/with nature or not, she plays out the role of artist as shaman in a persuasive manner. Her paintings invite us into unfamiliar territory and then she gives us a fair chance to work our way home.

As spare, precise and photo-realistic as her paintings are offered to us, they are subtly packed with a Zazen energy that causes in the viewer self-reflection and unification.

Other writers have described Shim’s art as “mysteries revealed,” citing that her expression of Asian culture involves mysticism and mysteries which are somehow beyond the veil of Western understanding. To me that smacks of the same ethnocentric view that she struggles to overcome, a malady she seeks to bridge, if not heal, through self-enlightenment. Diversity may be the buzz word in the language of grant applications writers but it has no dominion here or in an increasingly multi-cultural world.

In her own words Shim declares: “Through the ability of forming images which seek transition rather then definition, I have sought to access conditions of space, time and personal experience that make the exchange of cultures both meaningful and continuously open to understanding differences and creating room for introspection and growth.”