Visual artist Minyoung Lim Follow.Art Card

About me

**Sensing the Invisible Through Painting**

During my undergraduate years, I often collected discarded objects from a dumping area behind my school and used them to make artworks. After each student exhibition ended, I would watch those works return to the same place they had come from. This led me to ask: What is art? What meaning can art hold in our lives?

For me, faith is, before it is a particular doctrine, a way of perceiving the world. There are things that cannot be easily explained or proven, yet are unmistakably felt—states such as grace, protection, and restoration. These have become fundamental to the way I encounter and understand the world.

My work is less a means of delivering a specific message than a process of holding onto what I sense and experience in life. To paint is, for me, to carry a fleeting moment into permanence.

The brief moments of worship in which homeless people gather on the street and then disperse, and the sensations of grace and love that cover my imperfect self, are recorded through painting. Through the work, these moments are sustained and allowed to remain.

Art is like a window in a house. One can live without a window, but a window brings a wider and more beautiful world outside into the life within.

The vision of my practice is to become a sign that points toward the living God. In more artistic terms, this means making paintings that allow the invisible to be sensed; continuing to mediate through visual language a presence that cannot be fully explained; and exploring within painting the traces of what cannot be represented, and the ways in which such a presence is experienced and perceived in human life.

For me, making art is a direction in life to which I have been called by God.

Through painting, I hope to continue responding to the questions and sensations that repeatedly emerge in everyday life, creating works that function as quiet markers—inviting others to sense what cannot be seen.