The Brief

Artist Justin N. Kim paints vibrant depictions of L.A. neighborhoods from a bird’s-eye view, creating almost 3-D models of city blocks with oil paints.

He recently spoke with How To LA about how he got started, and his process. It’s all part of an occasional series where we hear from artists about how they see the city.

Block paintings 

Kim is from Fresno, but spent a lot of time in L.A. as a child when he would accompany his parents, who owned a clothing store and would travel to the Fashion District for work.

“My mom dropped me off somewhere downtown because, you know, I didn't want to tag along,” he says, “and I was walking around, and I saw … skyscrapers, streets, a bunch of cars … smog in the air. I just loved it.”

He moved to the city in 2015 for art school and just a few years ago began painting images of L.A., block by block. He has a series of paintings he calls maps that show top-down, geometric views of the city.

A close up of Justin N. Kim's Downtown LA painting.

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Victoria Alejandro

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“If you open Google Maps, and you zoom in enough to see the land and building blocks, this is what you’re going to see,” Kim says about his artwork.

He piles oil paint on top of oil paint so the structures pop off the canvas.

Artist Justin N. Kim stands in front of his oil paintings at his Pasadena studio.

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Victoria Alejandro

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The maps come in various sizes and scales. A painting of Downtown L.A. could be the size of printer paper. The depiction of the Forest Lawn cemetery is a large panel with swaths of transparent green. All of his works have a varying color palette — from his paintings of Koreatown to Los Feliz.

“There's a couple of different bodies of work that I do, but I think they all come from the same place,” Kim says. “And that place is where everything's connected. And everything's happening all at once. And I feel like that's true. At least in the maps.”

‘You can do this’ 

After school, Kim did work as an art handler in L.A. but got laid off at the start of the pandemic. That experience, he says, had a silver lining because it gave him a chance to really start work as a painter.

“I thought, OK, I should just give it a go. To be fair for myself, you know, why wait? Because time's gonna run out either way,” he says. “So that's how I got my start.”

He started posting his map paintings on Instagram and then began selling small works of art. That gave him confidence, he says, “and signaled that, ‘OK, you can do this.’”

Before he paints, Kim roughly stencils out the map. Then comes the color. Oil paint can take weeks to fully dry, but once it’s set he goes in with a knife to give it some structure, pulling it up in some places and then peeling it away in others. It has taken up to two months to complete a project.

“It's just waiting for the paint to dry, which is absurd.” But, he says with a laugh, “you can't spell painting without pain.”

Kim’s work represents real places in L.A. in a miniature way. “I feel like it's under my control a little bit,” he says. “I don't know if I'm saying this correctly, but there's a reason why people like miniatures and, for me, it's because you can, like, kind of hold it.”

Koreatown, oil and acrylic on panel, 9 x 12 in, 2022.

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Check out more of Kim’s work on Instagram and his website. Kim’s work was also featured at the national art showcase for local artists called The Other Art Fair in September. His work will be at the LA Art Show in February 2024.

Listen to the conversation

The Democratic National Committee on Wednesday sued President Donald Trump’s administration for recent television advertisements that promoted his political message while costing taxpayers millions of dollars.

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleges that the ads are illegal government-sponsored propaganda and accuses Trump of personally directing them. It asks the court to declare the ads illegal and stop the use of federal funds to pay for them.

Trump has faced bipartisan backlash for the ads, which glorify him and echo his campaign pitch as voters cast early ballots with the midterm elections less than a month away.

The spots, which began airing in September, already have cost more than $12 million to run, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact, and a total of $20 million in Homeland Security Department funding has been tapped to pay for them.

Responding Monday to the criticism, Trump defended the ads as “positive promotion for our Great U.S.A.” but said he’d pay for them using his MAGA Inc. super PAC going forward.

But on Tuesday, the fifth ad in the campaign began airing with the notice “paid for by the U.S. Government,” promoting Trump’s military actions in Venezuela earlier this year. The same day, Trump made it clear he hasn’t committed to reimbursing any money that has already been spent, telling reporters “we’ll decide.”

DNC Chair Ken Martin said in a statement that Trump is misusing taxpayer dollars in “a last-ditch attempt to save Republicans in November.”

“Americans deserve better than to have their hard-earned tax dollars used for Trump’s illegal schemes,” he added.

Legal experts have suggested the ads run afoul of a federal statute against congressionally appropriated money being used for “publicity or propaganda,” and potentially other federal laws. The Homeland Security money tapped for the ads comes from a $175 million package Congress gave to the department as part of Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda.

The White House has defended the ads as public service announcements akin to what past administrations have done to promote various policies. Legal experts have said the recent ads differ from many past public service announcements because they aren’t aimed at helping members of the public benefit from specific government programs.

The defendants in the lawsuit — Trump, the White House, DHS and the Office of Management and Budget — didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Fall has only just begun, but it's already time to start thinking about the quintessential winter bug: the flu.

The annual flu season usually starts in October or November. But this year, it looks like the flu started to pick up in early September.

"There are enough signs pointing in the same direction to make me think, 'OK, yes. This is the start of flu season,'" says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The percentage of people testing positive for the flu in the West has been rising steadily since around the beginning of September, she says. And the number of people showing up in emergency departments because of the flu has also been rising for weeks, she adds.

"It's very uncommon to see flu activity rising this early. It's activity that we might normally see more like November or December," she says.

The timing of the flu season isn't the only thing that's odd. It's also unusual that flu activity seems to have started in Western states, such as California, Washington, Hawaii and Alaska.

"It typically starts in the South and then expands from there," Rivers says. "So two uncommon developments there."

Rivers stresses that the amount of flu activity is still very low in most parts of the country. But that's starting to change as the flu picks up nationwide.

It's unclear why flu activity would have started so early, and in such an unusual part of the country. But one clue might be a new variant that evolved a mutation, which appears to make it better at evading existing immunity, especially among teenagers.

"That's our best argument for what's going on right now in terms of this early flu season," says Dr. Alex Greninger, a virologist who heads infectious disease diagnostics at the University of Washington. Doctors there are seeing as much flu right now as they usually would around Christmas, and the mutated variant appears to be common, he says.

So Greninger, Rivers and others are urging people to think about getting their flu shot earlier than usual.

"It's crucial that people get an influenza vaccine," says Scott Hensley, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania. "And this might be a year that people might want to get a vaccine early."

But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasn't been promoting flu shots as it usually does. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the CDC, is a long-time vaccine skeptic.

"It is disappointing that CDC is quiet given that flu kills of hundreds of kids a year and can result in tens of thousands of hospitalizations and tens of thousands of deaths," says Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who resigned last year as the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to protest what he called political interference at the agency.

The CDC declined to make an official available to NPR for this story. In a statement, a CDC spokesperson said, "CDC is developing a communications strategy to provide clear, accessible information about influenza vaccination and other critical steps people can take to protect themselves during respiratory virus season. This includes information about the benefits and risks of vaccination to support informed decision-making."
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