Byron Kim’s new series “B.Q.O.,” is an acronym for Berton, Queequeg, and Odysseus, three important characters from famous oceanic tales: Stanisław Lem's Solaris, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and Homer’s The Odyssey. Kim first began this body of work during his Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island in Florida in 2019 and continues to expand on this new subject for his solo show at the gallery in January 2022.

Expanding on Kim’s ongoing practice of portraiture, these new works are oceanic portraits, based on photographs taken by the artist or drawn from personal memory. Each work in the series comprises three panels that represents a distinct visual zone: the bottom panel captures the view of the ocean from underwater, the middle panel the water’s surface and its reflection, and the upper panel the sky. For Kim, these segmented depictions of bodies of water find parallel with the human body, with the zones of sky, surface, and underwater relating to head and throat, chest and belly, and base, respectively.

Kim is looking at the ocean in a direct, observational way, meditating on its rich history as a subject in art history and literature. For Kim, the content of these works is palliative, as the artist, like so many of us, found healing power and connection in nature during the pandemic. Yet these works also embody concerns of climate change and the threat of rising sea levels, contemporary anxieties that only intensify the ocean’s ominous power once symbolized in those iconic literary tales.