MJ KIM has worked extensively across all disciplines of the arts — not just creating, but also archiving, culturally critiquing and advocating for the Australian arts industry and the importance of physical media.
ABOUT
Having lived across three states along the East Coast of Australia, MJ Kim has long been captivated by the complexities of national identity and her place within the Australian zeitgeist as a first-generation Asian-Australian. From an early age she frequented Sunday markets, antique stores, and op shops, hunting for unique vintage clothing and quirky knick-knacks, searching for identity. Her fascination with the stories embedded in material objects — along with the lives of those who once owned them — has greatly shaped her distinctive visual and written sensibility. She is interested in archiving her life and the lives of others, these oral histories and the mundane reminders of places and people past and present. MJ Kim is especially drawn to the “in-between” and interdisciplinary, finding beauty and honesty in nuance and seeking to infuse it into everything she creates.
Photographer: Alex Fredriksson, 2025
She lives and breathes her industries. You’ll find her behind the merchandise table for Roadrunner Tours’ Melbourne shows (The Space Lady, Sachiko Kaneobu, Jim E. Brown, Gwenifer Raymond), avidly attending live music gigs and local screenings, creating cover art and posters for local musicians, photographing gigs and collecting Australian film and music memorabilia. She has donated four pieces of Australian film ephemera to the RMIT Australian Screen Research Collection (previously the AFI Collection) and continues to amass culturally significant items with the aim of bringing them to light. Even the houses she has lived in have been used as a shoot location on numerous occasions!
Growing up, she was first and foremost a fan; giving her direct insight into the extraordinary impact that the arts industry can have on someone’s life. Her deep, life-long involvement in fan culture has shaped her — in building community, developing pictorial editing and writing skills, formulating aesthetics, fostering curiosity and encouraging passion in an increasingly automated world. For her, the arts is always personal. She approaches every creative discipline with the same ethos: that the significance of them lie in their raw reflection of life. One cannot create or analyse art without having truly lived themselves and accepting the context in which they have emerged from.
She has a BFA (Visual Arts) from the Victorian College of the Arts (2022) and is currently based in Naarm / Melbourne, Australia.
© MJ Kim 2026
