Heige Kim certainly sees the irony in being looked at as an “emerging artistic voice.” At 54 years of age and recently named one of seven local artists who will showcase work at the Institute of Contemporary Art’s annual NextGen exhibition, it’s difficult not to be amused.

“When I applied for the exhibition, I did think the name of it was interesting,” Kim says. “When I was selected, I’ll admit I burst out laughing.”

However, it’s also easy to understand why the four-person jury — made up of distinguished local educators, curators and art advisory organizations — selected Kim to be included in the group exhibition. Yes, she is decidedly the eldest of the seven participating artists, all of whom have recently graduated from a local college or university. And sure, there is a diplomatic sageness to her art, a self-actualized cognizance of the ways in which the world operates.

But it could also just be that Kim’s work is simply too good to ignore and, what’s more, that it’s the result of decades of transforming her practice to find her true artistic voice.

“For me, I have this little time left and I decided to spend that time really making this shift I wanted to make,” Kim says. “To communicate differently and to get more clarity on what it is I wanted to communicate with my art. To me, that’s the next step for me. So seeing a word like ‘NextGen,’ it made sense to me.”

Heige Kim is one of the featured artists in the upcoming “NextGen 2023” art show at Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego.

(Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Decidedly experimental in nature, Kim uses video, sculptural installations and, at times, performance art to explore “how the visual remnants of what we consume reflect how our personal lives intersect with science, technology, and the public system.” More simply, she uses discarded and unwanted materials to create confounding and majestic installation pieces that instill both a sense of inquisitive wonderment and existential dread. Even more simply: She’s looking at her own trash, as well as others, and reinterpreting that trash into art.

“I operate in the realm of the art world, and I am making art, but what’s happening in my work right now is that I’m not transforming the material,” says Kim. “I’m using it to become an art object.”

Still, Kim has spent the majority of her life working as a painter and curator.

Born Hee Jin Kim in South Korea, her parents participated in the democratic Gwangju Uprising in the country, which eventually forced them to immigrate to the San Fernando Valley in the early 1980s. Like many children who immigrate to another country at a young age, Kim remembers feeling isolated and out of place. Often her only means of communication was art, drawing and sketching to show to her classmates and teachers. She looks back on this formative experience as something of an early example of the approach she now brings to her early works in abstract painting.

“Visual art also means communication,” Kim says. “I think as I became more mature and older, I began to think more and more what it is I want to communicate. Painting for me for so long was a way for me to learn about myself, why I wanted to use abstract language to communicate visually.”

Heige Kim is one of the featured artists in the upcoming “NextGen 2023” art show at Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego.

(Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

She went on to study art at University of California Los Angeles. However, she had to drop out for personal issues and, in 1996, eventually moved to New York City, where she thrived in the art scene, working as a curator and painter. But as rent prices continued to rise in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, she and her husband decided to move to upstate New York. There, she started Roos Arts, a visual art space in Rosendale, N.Y. It was there where she began to slowly transform her practice, dabbling more in video, performance and installation work.

“It was a time of experimentation,” Kim remembers. “And because I was in such a small town, I began to think more about community and what happens within a small community.”

These experiments started simply enough: crafting small sculptural works inside her studio to give as gifts to her friends. Soon, Kim says she began thinking more broadly about what she calls the “circulation of objects.” This work resulted in Kim wanting to return to school, first back to UCLA, and then to UC San Diego to get her master’s degree in fine arts.

“I had this outlook that I have to do this now or I’m never going to do it,” said Kim, adding that she was often the oldest person in the classroom. “I jumped in, and I learned so much. I was learning from the young. Like, literally, some of my classmates were teenagers, but they were so welcoming and curious.”

A practice that began in small-town New York, explored further at UCLA, and perfected at UCSD is now Kim’s full-time practice. Collecting her own detritus and visiting landfills, her video installations such as “I Make Trash, Mountain” and “34-Degrees Latitude” explore land use, specifically landscapes that have been turned into what she calls “wastescapes.”

She will be showcasing a piece from her ongoing series “Out of Place” at the NextGen showcase, which officially opens Sept. 16 and will be on view at ICA San Diego/Central in Balboa Park through Jan. 28. Originally debuted at Kim’s MFA thesis exhibition at UCSD, the installation blurs the lines of sculptural, sound and performance art. Assorted objects and items that were once discarded are now repurposed into something of an interactive, totemic monument that works, as Kim puts it, to collapse the “space between the animate and the inanimate.”

“The road I’ve taken has not been a straight one, that’s for sure,” said Kim, who will be returning to South Korea this month to further explore the personal memories and “missing parts’’ of herself that she incorporates into her art. “I’ve never walked the line. I did more of a meandering one, learning about different aspects of the art world, sometimes the fringe art world, always asking what art means. I think for me to look beyond myself and that journey that I took on, it led me to where I am today.”