MEMBER FEATURE:

Our monthly Member Feature aims to showcase the talent that occupies our buildings and celebrate their work.

This month, we had the pleasure of interviewing Rockella Space Member Gb Kim. Based at One Eyed Studios, Kim is a visual artist and scholar of aesthetic politics, colonialism, and the history & philosophy of science. Raised in the laboratory spaces of biologists, Kim’s approach to image-making is deeply informed by the language of taxonomy, epistemology, and the politics of knowledge making.

With a background in aesthetic politics, colonial science histories, and science communication, Kim’s work interrogates how systems of classification shape both what we consider to be the “natural world” and human identity. Whether through painting or scientific illustration, their practice remains rooted in a critical investigation of how we define, name, and make sense of life—real or imagined.

Currently she works as a scientific illustrator and communicator and as primary artist for the Explorer’s Guide to Biology. Their ongoing work is focused on parameters of biological transformation, and the relationship between fictional organisms and organism extinctions.

To learn more about the creatives who call Rockella Space home, head over to the People page for a full list of in-depth interviews.

Photo by Ben Wentzel (IG: @durpaw)

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Gb Kim. I am most often a painter; my job-labor is as a scientific illustrator. I was born in Illinois, was raised in Virginia, and arrived home to NYC in 2010.

My relationship to the arts started in the sciences. I was raised by two bench scientists in both their laboratory spaces. The lab is incomparable to any other space I’ve been in. Its ecosystem, particularly an experimental lab, is intensely methodical due to the high level of control being exerted but it’s also a world that requires many kinds of creativity—emergent, enduring, playful, risky. And without a doubt my process occurs in the presence of that world, my mother’s practice in particular, her sharp and uncompromising rigor.

“in the year of”, 8ft. W x ~7.5ft. H, ink, acrylic, mulberry paper, watercolor paper

Photo by Ben Wentzel (IG: @durpaw)

How long have you been at Rockella Space and what is your favorite thing about having a studio at One Eyed Studios?

I’ve been at One Eyed since October 2024 and of course generally it provides the space I desperately needed to size up in my work, but also a designated space mentally to do that work. Specifically, I love the degree of support this studio organization provides—open studios and community events are quite labor intensive and especially difficult to do alone, so I am dearly grateful for what Rockella knits together for their artists.

Photo by Ben Wentzel (IG: @durpaw)

Have you connected and/or created a community with any other artists in the building?

I’ve had some chaotic life events that haven’t allowed me to be fully interpersonally present in the space, but I briefly met so many folks when participating in the October 2024 open studio and again in May (2025). I didn’t know how much I needed to experience those encounters, especially since the early pandemic. It’s deeply comforting just to be in a building with so many people making.

“in the year of”, 8ft. W x ~7.5ft. H, ink, acrylic, mulberry paper, watercolor paper

Photo by Ben Wentzel (IG: @durpaw)

Tell us about your work. What inspires you to create the work that you do?

The work I make is often in a series, and it would be fair to say that all the work is one long series. I think the common abstract thread is about the contradictions of seeing/being seen, knowing/being known—legibility—and how much exposure or obscurity is necessary, protective, endangering, freeing, and how to determine truth for myself, ourselves, other organisms, other subjects, other objects. To me, making work feels compulsive—but if I had to determine causality, I would say I feel motivated, or more accurately enraged, by seeing or experiencing incompleteness and flattening.

Photo Rocio Segura

How do you start a work? Tell us about your process.

I start at research—a great deal of search and research. The research for my current work began in 2021, consulting library staff at the NYPL (a free and excellent service btw) on european nautical charts from 1450 to 1850, which grew to include a study of early theropod evolution, early vertebrate evolution, and the several many extinction events preceding the appearance of humans. This also required that I make a detour into greco-roman history (but more specifically the roman transitional period from the republic to the empire) and their mythologies and, for a bit of fun, I looked for every reference to textile arts in The Aeneid (an exceptionally paced translation by Shadi Bartsch). I do have to be careful because research could always go on indefinitely—but I also think that this long process comes out of needing to know what exists in order to shape my own rules and parameters for making work.

Parameters obviously change project to project; for this current work, because I was working with “marine monsters,” I wanted to somewhat literally pull the shapes out of water so I created dozens of washes in ink and drew shapes I saw directly over the washes; some of these outlines were then projected in sections onto the largest roll of watercolor paper I could get my hands on. There’s also a lot of back and forth between breaking away from set paths in order to enjoy process and reestablishing methods in order to finish.

“Magnetoreception” (biodictionary term), drawn in pen, digitally painted

Your work bridges visual art, scientific illustration, and philosophy. How did you come to work at this intersection?

Well, I think it’s probably about how I “practice” for making anything—I’m a completely incompetent sketchbook keeper, I personally find sketching to be extremely stressful, which seems incorrect. I just can’t make sense of it. But in that frustration I’ve realized that the way I “practice” is by performing different roles in different fields and studies.

For instance, making images for scientists is great because I’m not in the driver’s seat; they provide the foundation and they know what they want. I study specifically the philosophy of science, how the scientific self (term from Objectivity by Lorraine Daston & Peter Galison) and its ethos came to be; this study is, to me, about considering the politics of agency, care, and responsibility. Everything else is just filling a cup—research is simply absorption. And in the end, everything I work on feels like the same thing, whatever I’m working on feels like it’s all ultimately moving in the same direction, at the same frequency.

“in the year of” (paired text with painting), 17in. W x 24in. H, silk organza, cotton, silk, gold leaf thread, nylon, crystal

Photo by Ben Wentzel (IG: @durpaw)

As the primary scientific illustrator for the Explorer’s Guide to Biology, how do you balance accuracy with artistic interpretation?

Oh boy, with difficulty! Interpretation is always happening, even in a scanning electron microscope image, we are still seeing choices made by technicians, specimen preppers, and the like. This is probably the broadest definition of what “curation” is, that any produced thing is inherently framed (I love how curation is excavated in this essay “Who Is Curating What, Why?” by John Kuo Wei Tchen).

In any case, I know my understanding of the subject matter is the biggest arbiter of the level of accuracy that can be achieved, and what kind of accuracy. Because the question is, for what purpose is the accuracy? There’s accuracy for reality—which then becomes about what level of reality, short of a photograph, or maybe it must be a photograph—even then it’s a curated reality. Then there’s accuracy for effective comprehension which is maybe not about accuracy at all; for example, a metaphorical image may be more effective in, say, portraying the organization of neurons in the visual cortex of the brain.

“were brighter”, 6ft. W x ~6.5ft. H, ink, acrylic, mulberry paper, watercolor paper

Photo by Ben Wentzel (IG: @durpaw)

Your research explores biological transformation and fictional organisms. What draws you to these themes, and how do they manifest in your artwork?

Inherently, transformations violate category/categorization, whether these are categories of biology or human social categories. I relish any potential for mischief, chaos, and pleasure in a transformation. And in thinking about transformations, I am often thinking about extinction.

Specifically I was interested in the strangeness around organisms like dinosaurs as “real myths,” a strangeness that affected not just extinct animals, but extant (living) organisms and fictional organisms. Our human cultural awe, reverence, fetishism, disgust, even worship plague all 3—extinct, extant, and fictional—but the fictional organism is, I think, the pivot… or at least holds enormous capacity for a very funny and very sad irony (I do want to note that technically dinosaurs are not extinct, they exist in the form of modern birds–descended from theropods).

The allure for me is that I’d of course like to be party to mischief, chaos, and pleasure, but I am always hoping to show that biology is probabilistic and not deterministic—that evolution has no ultimate “goal” or “design,” it simply is.

I cannot say I’ve figured out how to clearly substantiate these themes in my work… With the current project I kept trying to figure out how to… annihilate the atlas as an icon, a use-item, a flat collection of flattened things. So I made large shapes cut away from a page, things that could not be made “heads nor tails of” nor easily handled. Then I wrote accounts/assessments of the shapes/organisms, as if it were a primary field source—assessments that were not useful, assessments that were not assessments, assessments that impeded our ability to consume the organism. I presented these assessments through wool, silk, cotton and gold—a nod to the historical literal and figurative richness of “the thread” as it pertains to folk tradition, folklore, divinity, mythology, narration, and “women’s work,”—to weave a tale, to cut a lifeline. I love folklore where individuals, typically a woman, use the thread for mendacity, to deceive, trick, hold power—sometimes portrayed as more efficacious than any obvious weapon.

“Translation of Smells from the Nose to the Brain”, (“What are Neurons and Glia?” by Helene Engler), drawn in pen, digitally painted

In your work, you investigate organism extinction—does your practice engage with climate change or ecological loss in a direct way?

Haha, while I wish it did, I certainly don’t think so. I am not gifted with nor learned in the ability to execute meaningful direct actions that have material impacts—least not perhaps in my artwork. For better or worse, I am trying to make work that “deals” with (ideally breaking/perforating) the colonial mindset so endemic in the sciences, or more generally combating human-centric notions about life. This is largely an abstract process, and easily arguable as materially ineffective against climate change or ecological loss. My investigation of organism extinction is just a means to think carefully while in the company of dread, to deny the nihilism that grips techno-oligarchs and rightwing eugenics projects.

In reality, direct engagement with the climate crisis probably looks like destroying data centers for large learning models, hypothetically.

Photo by Ben Wentzel (IG: @durpaw)

You study decolonial theory and aesthetic politics—how do these frameworks shape your artistic approach?

I think part of how we might break the material power of the myth of eurocentrism is by clarifying the role science played in justifying its hierarchies, its taxonomy, and thus its imperial projects. My approach in general is to deny the ahistorical status quo eurocentrism claims to be, that it does not contain nor maintain the universally preferential mode of being; it is not normal; it is not the standard (see What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction To His Life & Thought by Lewis Gordon for analysis of euro-western ontology).

Aesthetic politics I mean in many ways: to mean the political choices and material effects of art and artists, to mean the performance, the flattening theater/spectacle of political life (a la Walter Benjamin), to mean the political dynamics of looking and being looked at (the gaze, the Panopticon), but most especially I think of aesthetic politics as the tricky sticky backbone of taxonomy.

Altogether they provide frames for understanding a thing and its alleged category: its aesthetic sense politically, personally, functionally. They are useful to me especially for determining where or if edges between an A and a B exist, and why we would or how we could dissolve that distinction. And as a visual artist it is simply logical that I cannot do my work honestly or rigorously without an examination of representation, of presentation, and implicitly, re/presentations and categories of the self.

“kept warp”, 7ft. W x ~8ft. H, ink, acrylic, mulberry paper, watercolor paper

Photo by Ben Wentzel (IG: @durpaw)

Scientific illustration has traditionally been seen as objective. Do you think it carries implicit biases, and if so, how do you challenge them in your work?

I use “science” here in its contemporary sense, which is via its western european trajectory. The history of objectivity in the sciences is a burden for both scientists and their image makers, rightly so due to the power of re/presentation. “Objectivity” itself is a hugely slippery term, but for our purposes I think the slippage here is: objectivity as validity and validity as power. It goes without saying—while I say it—that what counts as “valid knowledge” has historically been governed by white european men, which is to say what counts as valid knowledge was, and still often is, determined by colonial/capital interests.

Science needed the drawn image for its initial dissemination, a primary form of evidence especially in a time before the camera. So the challenge of how to deal with objectivity, accuracy, and bias was also the challenge of the scientific image. (See again, Objectivity by Lorraine Daston & Peter Galison, also Leviathan and the Air-Pump by Steven Shapin & Simon Schaffer.) The futile, and frankly impossible, pursuit of removing the self from observation was and still is the torment of scientific selves and image makers.

I do not challenge implicit bias in my illustrative work in the sense that I do not ever endeavor to erase the self; in Donna Haraway’s essay Situated Knowledges, she talks about the “conquering gaze from nowhere.” “This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. This gaze signifies the unmarked positions of Man and White.” She provides that the reason why this position is so problematic is precisely because it is “unlocatable, and so [makes] irresponsible knowledge claims. Irresponsible means unable to call into account.”

So I will say that I question any insistence that a knowledge is unbiased. I want to make a distinction here that the experimental life requires that one avoid intentionally or unintentionally making a mountain of a molehill or vice versa—that one should do their best not to manufacture, acquire, or organize data to suit one’s personal desires or prejudices. But the whole truth of any observation is inherently limited by perspective and, critically, more limited by a perspective that insists that it has no perspective, perhaps most obviously demonstrated by the phrase “I don’t see race.” The point is to come to know and thus claim one’s perspective and its dire limitations—to become accountable to our perspective.

“promised”, 8ft. W x ~7.5ft H, ink, acrylic, mulberry paper, watercolor paper

Photo by Ben Wentzel (IG: @durpaw)

Your paintings have a delicate, fluid quality. How does watercolor relate to your themes of transformation and impermanence?

I spend a lot of time making, not only controlled decisions but also controlled lines (typically in a waterproof material) so in a functional sense, water introduces chance and chaos—forces me to deal with an uncontrollable force. Chaos is a matrix for transformation and impermanence. And, in another obvious sense, water is just completely ubiquitous across all processes on earth, referred to as the “medium of biology.”

Photo Rocio Segura

When illustrating scientific concepts, do you ever find yourself making creative decisions that challenge or reinterpret conventional representations?

Of course. I am not traditionally trained in scientific illustration which means that what I provide in an image iteration of research, an experiment, a concept, and so on, is unconventional. Hopefully more narrative, more strange, less binary, etc. Oftentimes the way something has already been represented is purely practical, and there is nothing I can contribute to its clarity by changing that representation. For example, chemical molecules are kind of unimprovable (but I’d be delighted to be wrong, and this happens often). But there are often lovely little opportunities to disrupt “convention”: exceedingly simple things like using ungendered language, drawing human bodies that are anything but white men, refusing to depict ableist terms/ideas, and so on. More than anything, it demonstrates how low the bar is and how anemic scientific images are.

“Positive Feedback Loops Involved with Labor and Delivery”, (“What is Homeostasis?” by Jay Labov), drawn in pen, digitally painted

You mention a focus on fictional organisms—how does speculative storytelling influence your art and scientific illustration?

Speculative fictional organisms, whenever and wherever they’ve been depicted, tell us a lot about ourselves, which is maybe obvious… I’m interested in what historical-fictional organisms say about our desires and fears—our eros. This includes how we might disfigure an existing organism; this might look like treating animals like human proxies or how even amongst ourselves we make one another godlike, monstrous, sub or superhuman. So I suppose in making anything I am always aware of how the edge of fiction is razor thin—that fiction is probably among the most generous and dangerous things we do.

“promised”, 8ft. W x ~7.5ft H, ink, acrylic, mulberry paper, watercolor paper

Photo by Ben Wentzel (IG: @durpaw)

What new directions or projects are you currently exploring in your research and visual work?

I’d like to really dig into the history of arthropods and specifically the period from 359,000,000 to 300,000,000 years ago; from about 315–300 million years ago is sometimes called “the age of giant insects,” and it’s honestly very exciting. I’ll also be looking into the history of emergency medical care, diagnostic medicine, and would actually love to work towards some EMT training.

For visual work, I do not know…but I suspect it will need to move somehow.

If you were to invite anyone alive or dead to a dinner party, who would be on your guest list?

This list will probably change tomorrow, but these are people who have provided me with thoughts that recur everywhere, everyday: Octavia Butler, Anne Carson (Men in the Off Hours), Jackson Pollock, Simone Browne (Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness), Kelly Link (Get in Trouble), Charles Darwin, Hippokrates, Robert Bakker (The Dinosaur Heresies), Edward Said, Jeff VanderMeer (Annihilation), and my mom. I do not think they would necessarily like to keep company or even conversation with me (with perhaps the exception of my mother), nor do I think I’d have anything useful to contribute, but I do think there’d be a great deal of clever, excitable yelling!

“Tomography” (biodictionary term), drawn in pen, digitally painted

What advice would you give to aspiring artists, particularly those wanting to move to NYC, who are looking to pursue a career in the art world?

There was something a friend sent to me by Zadie Smith where she wrote about a small drama on a Tuesday in our city and she wonders about the members of that scene like this: What do you call a group of people like that? A coalition of the willing? A loose conglomeration of citizens? A community of strangers? An improvised task-force? I think she expressed something related to this in other writing about how, in this city we are alone together.

People make beautiful, excellent art everywhere and do so in many other places that offer a much higher quality of life—to put it mildly—but NYC is an exceptional feast. And there is no single path for pursuing a life as an artist here. So I say if you want to be here, I think that’s all you need to know.

“kept warp” (Detail),7ft. W x ~8ft. H, ink, acrylic, mulberry paper, watercolor paper

Photo by Ben Wentzel (IG: @durpaw)

Where can people see your work in IRL or online, and how can people contact you for a studio visit? (Add links to social media, website, etc)

Folks are welcome to schedule and come by for studio visits via email (gbkimness@gmail.com). My personal website is gbkim.com and if people are interested in my work as a science illustrator please check out explorebiology.org (I may be moving institutions soon but I believe this URL will continue to be functional). On instagram @k.gb