A few years ago an installation Kim Huynh sent to the Faculty Exhibition in the Nickle Arts Museum centered on a large photographic image of her own face. In contrast with the characteristic asymmetry of her other installations, the face showed itself in carefully calculated frontality, as impassive, as aloof from the day-to-day quirks and foibles of commonplace humanity as that of any Ancient Egyptian Pharoh or Tang Buddha. The face was incontrovertibly hers and yet it as not the Kim I stop and chat with in the corridors of the Art Department, no did it mesh with the socio-politically engaged artist who seems to have dominated critical attention. The sense of mystery I experienced when I first encountered her top hats in felt and brief cases in caramelized sugar returned with reinforced intensity, and I knew myself to be in the presence of an artist of great depth and complexity, surpassing not only my capacity for understanding but, very likely, her own as well.

Eric Cameron

December 2009