Byron Kim & Victoria Fu

Suns, 2016
7766 Fay Avenue

33' x 32' 5"
Maryanne and Irwin Pfister - Wall Sponsors

This is the first artist collaboration between Victoria Fu, who primarily works with moving images, and Byron Kim, who is a painter. For this project, Suns, the starting image in the mural was taken from a top floor window of the site, the Empress Hotel in La Jolla. The resulting image went through a process of being printed, and then re-photographed as a printed photograph hung on a wall, staged with lighting in the studio. The glowing orb that appears sun-like is a reflection of a studio lamp on the photo's material surface. Its slanted incandescent light as captured on the studio surface echoes the actual raking light of a La Jolla sunset on the hotel's exterior walls.  

The result of this process and staging is made legible to the viewer as "a photograph of a photograph," the mural image a displaced reference to the actual view from the site. The artists worked toward a methodology that embraces the mural's medium as digital image printed on vinyl. The mural in-situ is self-reflexive, at times blending in with the actual La Jolla sky behind it, yet remaining a nod to the studio, the printing and photographing process, and the image as object.

Victoria Fu creates immersive installations that incorporate 16mm film, photography, sound, video and architectural elements. Victoria Fu was born in 1978 in Santa Monica, California. She received her BA in art from Stanford University, and then went on to receive her MA in Art History from the University of Southern California and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Fu further pursued her education through study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Whitney Independent Study Program. She is currently Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of San Diego.

Her work focuses on the interplay of virtual and physical spaces, utilizing a variety of media to highlight the digital and analog processes. She also has a collaborative studio practice with Matt Rich. Her artwork is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Fu lives and works in San Diego, California, and maintains a studio in Los Angeles.

Byron Kim is an American minimalist painter whose work blurs the line between representative painting and abstract, conceptual processes. Kim was born in 1961 and raised in La Jolla, California. He received his BA from Yale University and then continued his education in the arts at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. He is currently Senior Critic in painting/printmaking on the faculty at Yale University. Through the structure of minimalism, he grapples with issues of identity. Kim often works with a monochromatic or dichromatic palette, succinctly exploring ways of color-sampling different subject matter.

He gained early recognition for Synecdoche, his contribution to the 1993 Whitney Biennial, which embodied the aesthetic and political aspirations of the art in that year's exhibition. Among Kim’s numerous awards are the Alpert Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Louise Nevelson Award in Art, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment of the Arts Award, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. His works are in many permanent collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley; the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; the M+ Museum, Hong Kong; and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Kim lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Photos by Philipp Scholz Rittermann