Thomas Kong, convenience store owner and Chicago cult artist, dies at 73
Thomas Kong, who died on Monday at 73, was the owner of Kim’s Corner Food in Rogers Park, a longtime bodega-style convenience store that doubled as a kind of personal art epiphany and chaotic argument of art for art’s sake. He didn’t start making his works until 15 years ago, when he bought Kim’s and realized how depressing its shelves looked. So he cut shapes and objects out of construction paper and cardboard and covered the cold metal. Then he kept going, covering beverage coolers and chairs, ceiling beams and windows. Even the outside facade. Soon, his art covered every surface.
Within a few years, the charm and oddness from this unassuming geyser of creativity found admirers. By the time S.Y. Lim, executive director of the 062 Gallery in Bridgeport, contacted Kong in 2018 to do an exhibition of his work, the bodega held some 10,000 pieces.
“It’s up to around 30,000 by now,” she said. “You would walk in and there would be just art everywhere. Which sounds confusing. And it was confusing, but also very pleasant.”
Kong built spires out of bottles; used black plastic bags as palates; created collages of leaves and found objects; folded cigarette cartons into sculptures; tore Styrofoam into statues. “He would mail me some of the random things you could imagine,” said Lim, who became a close friend and helped Kong navigate through Chicago’s gallery scene.
Once, she got around to asking: Why are doing all this?
I like it, he replied.
Kong rarely explained his compulsion to make art out of the materials around him. But he made at least a dozen works a day, recycling whatever spare packaging and shipping containers came into Kim’s Corner Food. During the pandemic, “his work didn’t stop, we’d get several texts a day of pictures of new pieces,” said Nathan Smith, managing director of the Roman Susan gallery in Rogers Park, which included Kong’s art in about a dozen different exhibits over the past decade. Kong worked 12-hour days, seven days a week, always. He worked so much that when the Chicago Design Museum organized an exhibit of his art last year, Kong didn’t come to the opening. He couldn’t leave the store.
“I never knew how (his art making) started,” said Edward Kim, a nephew, “but I spent a lot of time in the car with him, especially this past year, driving him back and forth from doctor’s visits, and he definitely had a way of seeing life differently than the rest of us.”
Kim said his uncle “definitely” thought of himself as a working artist.
Whenever you walked into the store, you would find him at the counter register, hunched over new work, white hair hanging, flanked by a tape dispenser and Elmer’s glue, scissors in hand, and a cigarette stuck between his lips. His son, Marshall Kong, a radiologist who lives in San Diego, said his father died of complications from leukemia.
Marshall asked his father to work less. “But he didn’t want to.” Marshall asked him to quit smoking. “He wouldn’t. Since I was 7, it was a struggle. We fought over it a lot.”
He said he never did know much about his father’s art, only that “he did not arrive in Chicago with aspirations to become an artist or anything like that. He came here as an immigrant with an amazing work ethic, did odd jobs and became a business owner.”
Thomas Kong was born in North Korea in 1950, just before the start of the Korean War. His Korean name was Tae Kwon. As he recalled to the Chicago online magazine Borderless, when he was an infant, his father was kidnapped by North Korean communists and murdered; his family was instructed where the body had been dumped for retrieval. Soon after, his mother loaded Tae Kwon and his five sisters into a boat and escaped to a small island off the Korean peninsula, where they lived for three years before moving to South Korea. Kong said he never took a single art class. He had no formal art training. He attended college in Seoul and studied English literature, showing a particular fondness for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Arthur Miller. For several years he worked as a flight attendant for Korean Airlines. Then at 27, he left for Chicago on a family visa, encouraged by one of his sisters, who had moved here to become a nurse.
Initially, after moving to the Midwest, he was embarrassed at being an English lit major unable to speak much English. He worked at a gas station and did odd jobs. He also started a small shoe repair business in Hammond, Indiana. That blossomed into another shoe repair business in Skokie. And a liquor store in Burbank. And a dry cleaning service in Streamwood. He lost money when those businesses declined. In 2006, he bought Kim’s Corner Food from another Korean transplant, retaining the store’s name.
Though Kim’s is at street level — specifically, on the corner of Estes and Glenwood avenues — it felt subterranean. So much art covered the windows, the light was mostly artificial and a haze of constant cigarette smoke lent the small space a bit of surreality.
Kong would seem shy and guarded at his counter, smiling fast, then turning back to his art. When Lim of 062 Gallery first met him, she said he didn’t seem to “have other Korean friends in Chicago.” Being Korean herself, they would speak Korean exclusively. At the peak of the pandemic, when Kim’s needed merchandise, she would grocery shop for items he could resell. She also began to display his art in her gallery, paying him for anything she showed. She took it to art fairs in Tokyo and Taipei. She gave him the full proceeds of anything that sold — though he rarely wanted more than $20 for a piece. At Kim’s, if you wanted one of his works, Kong often asked only that you pay whatever you could afford.
For years he kept a small gallery at the back of the store, mainly to display other local artists. His own work, meanwhile, was shown often in local art spaces — and in galleries throughout Asia. He became a cult favorite in Rogers Park and the Chicago art scene. He gathered a small degree of serious art-world consideration. A critic for the online art forum Hyperallergic once described Kim’s mash of commercial items and handmade art as “a graveyard of the American Dream where the dead are reborn.” Tanner Woodford, founder of Chicago Design Museum, saw themes of mass production and climate change in Kong’s recycled pieces. “He saw the beauty in the most mundane thing right in front of you, then found any way to be inspired and flip it into his own vernacular art.”
“What was inspiring about Thomas was, like many artists, being creative was necessary to his well-being,” said Nathan Smith of Roman Susan. “It drove his days. He worked in this really meditative, almost prayerful way, and believed he was beautifying his world.”
That was reflected in the “Be Happy” stickers he attached to his art and most of the surfaces of the store. He saw it as a tidy, two-word summation of Jesus’ proverb-like Beatitudes.
Sandy Kong, his wife, said Thomas was attracted to religion 30 years ago, “when he was going through rough periods. The businesses were not doing well. He was dealing with vices (including a drinking problem), which got to the point where he wanted to change.” He converted to Christianity through a brother-in-law who worked as a Seventh-day Adventist pastor, though Kong saw himself as more of a denomination-less Christian.
“Thomas had a very difficult life,” Sandy Kong said. “But he worked hard and eventually he found a lot of pride and happiness in making his art.” As a way of clarifying the uncertain future of all that work, Lim began a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for Kong’s funeral and maintain Kim’s. (Within hours of launching, it had already raised more than $2,000.)
A funeral will be held Wednesday at the Smith-Corcoran Funeral Home (6150 N. Cicero Ave.) in Sauganash, with visitation at 10 a.m. and a service at 11 a.m. Kong is survived by his wife Sandy; son Marshall; five grandchildren; five older sisters, and many nieces and nephews.
He also left behind tens of thousands of small handmade reminders of restless creativity, in a quiet corner bodega, tucked beside the Red Line, on a sleepy stretch of Rogers Park.
