Enzo Kim always drew as a kid. He grew up eager to explore his artistic imagination, finding it difficult to be limited by school art projects. Regardless, he continued drawing, unaware of the artist he would soon become.
“I was definitely a sponge back then — I was just taking it all in,” Kim said.
As well as art, he also found another passion early in life. In eighth grade, Kim picked up basketball and a love for sneakers, but suddenly got injured in his junior year of high school. By not being able to play anymore, Kim was forced to find a new way to stay involved. This furthered his fascination with sneakers, which eventually turned into his canvas today.
“So they gave me their old pairs of Vans and I started drawing on them with Sharpies,” he said. “I gave them back to them and they were like, ‘Dude, I’ll pay you for them,’ and then eventually my other teammates started giving me their shoes.”
In his downtime, he plays video games and watches anime, which has become a huge source of inspiration for his art. Today, he incorporates these characters into his work to evoke their stories and emotions by painting the characters with movement and scenery.
Kim is a third-year product design major who has nearly 13,000 followers on Instagram. He is most known for painting sneakers, typically incorporating the anime and video games that inspire him and his clients.
“It’s a very rewarding feeling to be able to do something you love while also having others really feel happy about it as well,” he said.
Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Kim, like most others, had to stay home. But he couldn’t sit still. Kim quickly got to work designing and pushing his artistic abilities. Two years after discovering his passion, having a lot of free time allowed Kim to hone his skills and constantly push out shoes.
The first pair Kim designed were inspired by Katsushika Hokusai’s famous Under the Wave Off Kanagawa woodblock print and samurai culture. He painted those for teammates in high school. Since then, he has developed skills to convey entire stories through a pair of shoes by incorporating not just characters, but the scenery and emotions from the video games and anime. His favorite project was inspired by Studio Ghibli’s animated film “Howl’s Moving Castle,” which included shoes and an accompanying carrying bag he created with skills from his product design studies.
“The reason I’m so attached to the project is because it was a culmination of all the things I’ve learned in the past few years,” Kim said. “Most of my pairs kind of just go on display in people’s homes, but designing that pair knowing they were going to be worn changed the way I designed it.”
At the age of 18, Kim earned a sponsorship from Angelus Direct — a company that specializes in creating paints for shoes. With greater accessibility to paint and more traction for his work, he was able to blossom.
Kim doesn’t limit himself to painting shoes though. This past fall, Kim was tasked to create a clothing line of three pieces in only five weeks. He decided to design his garments with a fusion of his Korean heritage and painting background.
He designed a vest, a traditional hanbok and a pair of pants. Kim’s pieces consisted of 50 percent hemp and 50 percent cotton fibers, perfect to highlight the customizability of his work by better retaining the paint. His classmates and instructor finished his vest by pressing their painted hands against the vest.
“I styled them to look like traditional Korean work outfits,” Kim said. “I also wanted to hone in on the fact that it’s also painter’s wear. You can get dye on it, you can get paint on it and it’ll retain the color.”
With expanding mediums of art and consistently amazing sneakers, Kim’s future work is something to look forward to.
