WHO is Kimvalrie (金包銀)?

Kimvalrie is a Taiwan-born American art enthusiast and self-taught artist, who decided to pack up her legal practice in late 2021 for a healthier lifestyle and turned to art creation in early 2022.

One can see Kim (short for Kimvalrie) as a contemporary Expressionist that embodies a hue of surrealism and fauvism, who writes poems and practices a heavily dialectic and empathetic style of philosophical thinking. Highly interested in history and anthropology, Kim’s artworks and poems internalize Western and Asian cultural concepts and explore shared human nature. Many senior artists have praised that Kim is particularly talented in the use of colors, bold imagination, and highly skilled at portraying facial expressions that both evoke emotions and invoke audiences to meditate on meaningful issues in life.

One feature in Kim’s artworks is the use of mixed media where color foil tape and color foil paper is particularly featured, and there are philosophical meanings behind such presentations. Foil color tape/paper generates flowing changing colors as a viewer moves in the space to view the artworks from different angles. It echoes the Buddhist and Daoist (or spelled as Taoist) long-held view that “change is norm” – most things in life are transient, just like the colors you see at this moment change into some other colors the next moment. It also reminds the audience that truth can be multi-faceted: all we can see is just a part of it.

Another feature of Kim’s art is that she frequently uses simple media to create high quality fine art. Such media include regular school pencils, color pencils, watercolor, color foil paper and glitter glue. Kim highly values these types of materials. A good portion of Kimvalrie’s artworks is under a portrait series titled “Kimvalrie (金包銀): …,” where Kim serves as a model, to express a human’s feelings and emotions when living in treacherous surroundings and cautiously seeking justice and truth.

In late 2023, Kim started to create surrealistic fantasy worlds. Although Kim’s works often inform philosophical transcendence, occasionally, some of them also demonstrate her whimsical humor – another approach to life. Kim and her husband, Dan Neal (who is from Oregon, U.S.A.), met in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1998. They moved to New York in 2008.