Harmony 227, mixed media on Canvas, 34 x 57 inches, 2025
(HACKENSACK, NJ) -- Riverside Gallery presents a solo exhibition, Between Pulse and Horizon, featuring assemblages and sculptural paintings of Bong Jung Kim. The exhibition runs from April 10-27, 2026. Kim's recent body of work juxtaposes traditional painting with found objects in the fashion of a techno abstract expressionism with mechanical, electronic, and organically painted parts.
Contrary to his contemporaries such as Leonardo Ulian who pioneers techno assemblages of objects arranged in a symbolic and mystical array, Kim incorporates the legacies of abstract expressionism into the painting/assemblage onto which found and broken, discarded objects attach. These bits and pieces play a significant role in the composition and the reading of the overall abstraction. These parts, which often leave behind a trail of wires and/or other marks, interweave with the rest of the painting, creating an illusion of narrative regarding the process of creation.
The illusion or the fiction is that the painting was made through the mark making with the found objects, as if the artist were including the brush with the painting in his presentation and idea. The objects become the central players which move and bend the space and colors around them, saturating and desaturating certain colors while compressing or deflating other nearby spaces, by the nature of their maneuver, trajectory, and personality. This fictional nature of this presentation regarding the works’ creation are no more fictional or made up than the choice of colors and the marks that a painter uses to render a portrait or a landscape. It is as if a portrait or the psyche of an abstract significance or concept occupies, as a signifier, the place of a literal portrait or a figure of a physical person.
Harmony 215, mixed media on canvas, 24 x 24 inches, 2025
Because humans are a symbolic creature who can visualize and interact with abstract objects and symbolic images, Kim’s approach to painting and assemblage cannot be dismissed as simply made up state of expression; rather, it is a sincere form of visual experimentation with the conceptual and visual elements.
Within Kim’s art, the conceptual involves the presentation of how the work is seen and experienced, and the fictional narrative of how the work was made, and this overlaps with the visual elements or, rather, the visual experience of the abstraction and assembly involving found objects. The found objects respond to the abstraction in the work, and the abstraction complements the material qualities and meaning of those same objects, in a feedback loop of meaning, materiality, and visual experience.
Bong Jung Kim received their BFA from the Seoul National University in 1990 and moved to the United States in the same year to pursue a career as an artist. Kim had solo exhibition at the President’s Gallery of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at CUNY in 2016 and participated in the “Shades of Time” exhibition in Gallery Korea (Korean Culture Center) in New York and the Queens Museum of Art in 2014.
Riverside Gallery is a 21st century pioneer in exhibiting international and regional artists, showcasing a diverse range of works from abstraction to representation on the topics and the questions that define our time. The Gallery is dedicated to providing opportunities for both established and newer artists, as well as meeting the requirements of high-end collectors and clientele. It is located at the Riverside Mall in Hackensack, NJ, within a close proximity to New York City, playing an important part in the discourse surrounding contemporary art and issues.
Harmony 211, mixed media on canvas, 24 x 24 inches, 2025
