NEWSLETTER

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VICE: When did your studio burn down?

Min Kim: Last March. I had been having a lot of fire dreams right before that and they were influencing my work. I must have done hundreds of paintings and drawings and sculptures with flames in them. Then my whole block burned down. My apartment and my studio. Everything. I only have one drawing left from that series (pictured here).

Have you done any fire paintings since then?

I’ve done enough of those. Sometimes I feel like I started that fire.

What happened in the dream?

As in every fire dream from then, I would turn on to my street to see my tiny little block on fire. It looked really dramatic because the trees were on fire and there’s a lot of trees on my block. There were people hovering over them in mid-air that didn’t care.

What did you do when you saw the fire? In real life I mean.

It was so much like the dream I couldn’t tell if I was awake or not. It seems like slow motion remembering it now. I cried a lot.

Have you had any other fire dreams?

I’ve had a lot of dreams that ended up happening in real life. Especially death. Especially my grandparents dying. When I was a kid I would have a lot of nightmares. After I moved to Baltimore I kept having dreams about a man following me. There were many dreams about this man, but the fire one was where he followed us into a house. It was falling apart and there were holes everywhere and I felt threatened. I held my roommate’s hand and we hid behind a door. When he found us I felt scared so I poured gasoline into his mouth and lit a match and he burned to death. Later I found out that the building next to me was new because the old one had burned down. There was an old man who lived above me that was burned in the fire.

Maybe you have so many different things happening in your dreams that when people say a tragic event happened you focus on that and forget everything else in your dream. Like when people think they always see the clock when it’s 11:11, or they always get in the slowest line.

Maybe. I don’t think so.

So you’re psychic.

I’m not.

What’s the explanation? It has to be one or the other.

There is no explanation.

MARKY SPENSE
Min Kim is the girl that did most of the “ass monsters” drawing that was on our Sweetest Taboo cover (vol. 8 # 2). She lives in Brooklyn and will be having some New York Shows presently by and by.

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