From Canvas to Community: Ho Jae Kim’s Mission to Empower API Youth Through Art
By Ashley Ye | November 26, 2024
Ho Jae Kim, an accomplished artist and founder of Civil Art, uses his creative talents to celebrate the beauty and complexity of life while advocating for meaningful causes. Through his recent Night Market exhibition, Ho Jae brought more than 60 creative participants together and raised funds to support Apex for Youth. His commitment to the API community and passion for fostering inclusivity and belonging are evident in both his art and his advocacy.
In this Q&A, Ho Jae shares his personal journey, the inspiration behind his partnership with Apex for Youth, and his hopes for how art can serve as a bridge to uplift and unite communities.
Read on to discover how his heritage, experiences, and creative vision continue to drive impactful collaborations and inspire the next generation.
Thank you, Ho Jae Kim, for sharing your inspiring journey and for using your art to uplift the API community. We express our deepest gratitude for fostering artistic exploration and for inspiring our youth to dream bigger.
Night Market with Apex for Youth
The Asian American community is diverse and complex, and through many generations of invisibility and inequality, there are layers of misconceptions. Due to generational neglect, individuals in our community living in difficult situations are often not recognized for the support they need. When I learned about Apex for Youth and its mission to support Asian American youth living in challenging circumstances, I connected with the organization’s purpose immediately. Personally, knowing what it is like to live in impossible financial and family situations, I empathize with the youth who must be going through experiences similar or worse.
Our youth are seedlings who have an entire lifetime of journey ahead of them, and I am grateful that organizations like Apex for Youth devote their time to nurturing them. If you live in such an environment for long periods, you may begin to shut the world around you away, and with it, you may lose the chance to build beautiful relationships. And when you begin to isolate yourself, it becomes ongoingly more difficult to reach out for help, even when you are suffering. I believe that Apex for Youth’s programming is very thoughtful as it provides not only educational and mental health resources but also one-on-one mentorship. It takes time to learn how to trust and open up and eventually see the beautiful things that exist in our world (sometimes so close to us!). I am glad that Apex for Youth builds relationships with our youth so that they can learn to trust and open themselves up to a limitless journey ahead of them.
A person’s experience in their younger years is crucial. Love and nurture, or the lack of them, become a significant part of a person’s psychological development, which impacts one’s approach to life, personality, and perspective. Although this is not always the case, many families living in financial difficulty may have difficulty expressing love due to the overextended bandwidth, torn between jobs and survival. So, after meeting Apex for Youth, I was very touched that there is an organization that exists solely to provide our youth with love and care that so many people in the world take for granted.
I also received such kindness many years ago. It was transformative and life-changing.
I am drawn to a certain quietness in moments of the in-between. We rely on fleeting moments of significance to define life, but most of our lives are shaped by non-moments of transition, endurance, and dormancy. For this reason, I chose to create representations of less significant moments to build a body of work that can paint a better picture of reality. Luxurious portrayals of life, as depicted in movies and pop culture, cultivate dreams of becoming a character in a fantasy, but these dreams are quickly shattered by the constraints and circumstances of daily life. We become psychologically displaced and rejected by the fantasies that once served as our vitality. We begin to live in a state of purgatory, caught between reality and our dreams.
Purgatory has become the overarching theme of my studio practice, as it is a proficient analogy for describing the reality I see on both personal and societal levels. Coming from a difficult financial background, much of my young adulthood was a test of endurance. For a decade, I held full-time restaurant positions as a dishwasher, server, manager, and director to support my higher education and, soon after, my studio practice in New York. For many years, I worked odd hours from 9 AM to 10 PM six days a week while squeezing a few hours to paint after midnight every day. However, the most challenging part about this journey was not the odd hours or labor but the feeling of invisibility. For a long time, most people saw me as a restaurant worker but very seldomly an artist. There was a discrepancy between how I saw myself versus how society saw me.
This discrepancy and invisibility is a shared experience, too common in our contemporary world. Whether the emerging artist with a bewildering dream but without the ability to manifest it into reality, a young student who never learned how to dream as life was only focused on surviving, or our Asian American history unknown even to us as education is still Eurocentric… too many exist but without presence in our society.
Night Market was not only a fundraising exhibition for Apex for Youth and Civil Art but also a celebration of our community’s achievements. We were able to embrace our community’s incredible accomplishments in visual arts, culinary arts, design, and scholastics and turn it into a celebratory occasion for hundreds of people to gather. In empowering our community, we must also love ourselves and be proud of who we are.
Although those of us in the art world may be familiar with the many accomplished artists of the API heritage, most of the world isn’t. For many visitors and the public, it was their first time seeing so much contemporary API art in one place.
Through combined efforts, Night Market accommodated over 800 in-person visitors through various events and programs, generated over 2 million views, and featured over 60 creative participants between our exhibition and publication. We provided two weeks of tours, a significant number of tours catered to youth groups affiliated with organizations such as Apex for Youth, Lower East Side Girls Club, and YS Kim Foundation. Not only were we able to make a statement in the long efforts for institutional change, but we were also able to fundraise for Apex for Youth so that our efforts can also make a direct impact on our community.
Beyond specific disciplines, fine art, culinary arts, fashion, design, and so many creative practices originate from the artist’s cultural story. However, in the fast-paced, consumerist society, these cultural stories are often not readily available. Even in the arts, many people see artworks as consumer products before they are seen as cultural artifacts.
I aim to develop a platform where philosophy, history, cultural narratives, and personal experiences are accessible and digestible. Upon learning, art can become a point of empathy and acknowledgment for those in the API community. For those who are not yet aware, art can become a point of entry into the diverse world of Asian Pacific Islanders.
Underscoring longevity and education will be important not only for me or Civil Art but also for other arts organizations when collaborating with the youth. Similar to how students can trust and build relationships with Apex for Youth through long periods of mentorship, students will need opportunities that provide long-term exposure to the arts to grasp the benefits of art education fully.
Utilizing my resources, I hope to provide a platform where we can provide art education to youth. Not only can learning about art be inspirational, but studies prove that art education has incredible benefits to students in improving standardized test scores, broadening understanding and appreciation of multiple cultures and histories, developing various problem-solving skills, expressing more school engagement, and lowering the chances of receiving disciplinary infractions. Unfortunately, funding for education, especially arts education, is on a continuing decline, and this is most pronounced for students of color attending under resourced schools.
I look forward to showing our youth the limitless possibilities that exist, and I hope that art education will help build a foundation that will help them in the lifetime of journeys to come.
In the long prospects of hoping for institutional change, not only must we consider our past and present, but also think about what is to come. Our youth is our future, and nurturing them is a key component of empowering our community.
Apex for Youth celebrated Brooklyn Nets’ AAPI Night by highlighting the journeys of Asian American athletes and professionals, exploring how heritage, identity, and resilience shape their experiences both within the game and in their communities.
At Apex for Youth, we believe in the power of opportunity. On Tuesday, October 8th, we witnessed this power in action as New York City’s AAPI community came together in an inspiring display of unity, culture, and generosity at Madison Square Park at Taste of Asia.
