The 99^th ARTCaffè hosted Helena Parada Kim.

Helena shared her journey from her multicultural roots in Germany — with a Spanish father and Korean mother — to her evolution as a painter. Trained in old master techniques yet challenged by avant-garde approaches, she found her voice by merging European traditions with Korean heritage. Her work explores themes of identity, memory, and absence through motifs such as the hanbok, Jesa rituals, still life, and plants. Parada Kim reflected on the “in-betweenness” of cultures, transforming personal biography into universal narratives and exploring presence and absence through painting.

Below is a recap of The Talk.

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Helena Parada Kim: I was born in Germany. My father was Spanish, my mother Korean, and like many other Korean women in the 60s, she came to Germany to work as a nurse, as a guest worker. I think that’s a very important part of my background.

When I grew up, my father inspired me a lot and helped me approach the art world. He was deeply interested in art history, especially the European old masters — Spanish, Dutch, and Flemish Baroque painting. He also taught me how to draw and paint, and was a major influence on my becoming an artist.

When I started studying at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, the school had a strong avant-garde approach: the idea of leaving art history behind.

My own approach, however, came more from traditional painting up until the 19th century. I had learned all the old masters’ techniques: painting, figurative drawing. For me it was quite difficult, but at the same time it broadened my horizons on what art can be. Among my professors at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, I especially connected with Peter Doig, who had perhaps gone through the same struggle in the 90s — painting figurative and romantic motifs when everyone in London and the UK was focused on conceptual art. I really identified with that.

During my studies, I also became more and more interested in my mother’s biography. With my traditional background in old master techniques, I began approaching her world. Traveling to Korea for the first time as a student was a real eye-opener. Everything felt very familiar, yet at the same time exotic and strange. People perceived me as not fully Korean; I had this feeling of beingin between. On one side, there’s suffering — not knowing where you belong — but at the same time, it becomes an energy, something that drives you to search for part of your identity.

For the last 15 years, I’ve been very focused on this: where I come from, my mother’s biography, and traditional Korean motifs. The hanbok has played an important role, as well as rituals like the Confucian Jesa.

Starting to work with Choi\&Choi Gallery was a great step. They were doing, as a gallery, exactly what I wanted to do as an artist: bringing together Korean and European art to create an exchange. My work is a kind of fusion. It’s authentic — it comes from inside, from my soul. And my search doesn’t stop; it keeps going.

Going back in time, Two Sisters is one of my oldest works, painted when I finished my studies in Düsseldorf. It’s quite different from my more recent paintings: very figurative, showing faces. Some might be reminded of David Hockney’s portraits— and indeed, at that time I was very into Hockney, especially his double portraits with empty interiors.

In this painting, you see two young women, friends of mine. One, Nina, sits on the sofa in casual clothes. The other, Jenny, is wearing a hanbok. For me, it became a metaphor: two sisters, one in European casual clothes, the other in Korean traditional dress. It was my way of expressing this in-betweenness. In later works,faces fade or disappear; the focus shifts to the hanbok itself. But here you can still see my training as a portrait painter.

The Dead Man shows a single figure lying on the ground, against an abstract, undefined background. The figure wears a hanbok that belonged to my cousin’s late husband. That was important to me — the hanbok of a deceased person carries an aura, as if the person were still present in the clothes. It’s intimate and moving. The title is also a reference to Édouard Manet’s famous painting The Dead Toreador. The pose is similar: a body lying on the floor, in a stage-like setting.

Wedding ducks are a traditional symbol of a long and happy marriage in Korean weddings. I first encountered them in Andong, a city in southern Korea known for preserving Confucian traditions. On Korean New Year’s Eve (Seollal), I stayed with a family who prepared the wooden ducks for me, beautifully wrapped in cloth.

In Wedding Duck, the object is presented almost three-dimensionally, luminous against the darkness. It is placed in a stage-like setting with a dark background, referencing old master still lifes.

By contrast, Sonae’s Chima has a golden, abstract background, built up with layers of pigment applied in horizontal and vertical strokes. It references East Asian painting and philosophy, where emptiness is as meaningful as the object itself. This was a turning point for me — moving beyond strict traditional methods into something more experimental, more open to abstraction. The hanbok itself— in this case, the inner layer of a black floral dress — floats almost weightlessly, dynamic yet suspended in emptiness. This sense of emptiness, inspired by Daoist philosophy, became very important in my work.

In Nurses and Cranes, based on a photograph of my mother with fellow Korean nurses in Germany in the 60s, the faces fade, like in an old photograph losing its colors. Behind them, I painted cranes from the traditional mural in Seoul’s Changdeokgung Palace — symbols of longevity and good fortune. Their black-and-white plumage mirrors the nurses’ uniforms. The cranes crossing the sea became a metaphor for the women’s journey from Korea to Germany.

From there, my exhibitions developed — still narrative, but gradually shifting. I also began painting plants, inspired both by my passion for gardening and by East Asian painting. The plant works have abstract backgrounds, but the plants themselves are rendered in oil with old master precision. Some glow in the light, others fade into darkness. I wanted them to avoid becoming too “sweet” or merely decorative, instead carrying something darker, more obscure, even aggressive —with strong complementary contrasts.

In contrast to the hanbok works, which focus on a single defined figure in empty space, the plant paintings overflow with lush vegetation, stretching beyond the canvas edges — immersive and almost endless.

Later works return to the hanbok, but with new strategies: gray abstract backgrounds, fading figures, mystery suggested through transparency and incompleteness. Faces disappear, and the tension between presence and absence evokes memory, loss, and the invisible.

Still life also enters my work, inspired by Jesa rituals in Korea, where food is offered to ancestors. I was fascinated by this spiritual yet irrational gesture — the living preparing food for the dead. I painted these arrangements with the austerity of Spanish Baroque still lifes (Zurbarán, Sánchez Cotán), meditative and severe, in contrast with Flemish exuberance.

I also experimented with folding screens — an Asian medium that is both pictorial and functional. Painted with large leaves against blue cotton, they created a three-dimensional effect, transforming the space.

Other works revisited family: a portrait of my great-aunties in Korea, placed in a mythological context. Ordinary people, given dignity through painting. This was also a reflection on the older generation in Korea, many of whom still live in poverty despite their strength and resilience.

In exhibitions like the one at the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne, I could show my paintings alongside historical objects from their collection — a traditional wedding robe, a sutra box — creating dialogues between past and present, between Korean tradition and my reinterpretations.

Recent works continue this fusion: hanbok paintings with references to Renaissance Madonnas, Fra Angelico, Flemish still life painters like Rachel Ruysch. The hanbok becomes a projection surface, a screen for other narratives: windows into other paintings, histories, and traditions. Sometimes it shelters figures under an open coat, echoing Christian iconography of protective Madonnas.

Throughout, the play between absence and presence remains central: figures fading, biographies dissolving, yet made visible through painting. My most recent shows in Cologne explored this further, combining folding screens, plant paintings, and Jesa still lifes — brought together in spaces designed to be meditative and immersive.

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