Ijen began painting while living in Nizhny Novgorod in 1997, with a set of gouache paints from a local shop. In Moscow, she bought her first oil paints and canvas, and began painting in earnest. Moscow became a favourite theme in her work, and so did China, especially Beijing.

This was born out of a desire to capture the atmosphere of cities undergoing rapid transformation, and to preserve in paintings something of the vanishing urban past. Her paintings range from simple attempts to seize a particular moment, be it a city scene or a landscape, to statements about politics, history, and where the world is going.

Since 2018, she has been living in Vienna.

Ijen Kim grew up in Wellington, New Zealand, the oldest of eight children in a family that valued creativity but saw art as not worth studying as you’d never make a living from it. She learned Russian as a teenager from Soviet sailors in the port, went on to study Russian and French language and literature, and then left for Paris to train as a simultaneous interpreter.

In the late 1990s, she moved to Moscow, where she worked as a journalist and translator, and then spent fifteen years working for the Kremlin, translating the Russian president’s speeches into English. While in Moscow, she began blogging and writing. She has published one novel in Russian, and two novels and a short story collection in English.

Vienna-based interpreter, writer and artist