On a winter day in 2001, Kim carried freshly dried sheets of the blue-pigmented paper to the street and held them up to the sky to color match them against the crisp blue of the patches of sky between buildings near Dieu Donné Papermill in New York City. Sky Blue Kite is made of handmade paper, the medium for "catching ideas." It is a publication by Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper (RCIPP) in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in collaboration with Dieu Donné Papermill. The paper was made in Western-style formation with pigmented pulp at Dieu Donné. Some white kozo was added to the vat just before the paper was formed to add some atmosphere and dimension to the surface. After the paper dried, RCIPP assembled them into the edition of kites. As a conceptual artist, Kim designed Sky Blue Kite as a trope for belief. We carry memory in our minds, our hearts, in our fingertips. We cannot "print out" an exact translation of our experience. But art, as a chosen object or, in Kim's case, a specific color, carries meaning and becomes the connection to what we have experienced and what in the end we choose to believe. We know the sky to be blue but one cannot cut a piece from the sky; one cannot hold it. There is no substance to this perceived blue, except perhaps The Journey of Byron Kim's Sky Blue Kite anne q. mckeown Byron Kim, Sky Blue Kite, 32 x 29 inches, Korean kozo, pigment, 2001. Editioned by Gail Deery and Mina Takahashi, in an edition of 30. Published by Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper (RCIPP) in collaboration with Dieu Donné Papermill. Courtesy of RCIPP, New Brunswick, New Jersey. The artist (with Megan Moorhouse of Dieu Donné Papermill) checking color proof against the New York City sky, winter of 2001. Courtesy of Dieu Donné Papermill, New York. summer 2006 - 21 as breath; it is the same with belief. The string is what attaches the flier to the kite as it turns and swoops through the reality of the sky. Winds move the kite towards and away from the sun in a constantly changing relationship. The color of the sky is different from zenith to horizon, as well as to and from the sun. The blue of the kite varies as the object changes its position in the sky. In the right combination of conditions, Sky Blue Kite, with its same colored paper tail, can for a moment disappear in the sky. In these rare and brief times, the string keeps the believer connected to his or her experience. During the Sky Blue Kite project, Kim worked concurrently on his Sunday Paintings, a series of sky studies he did on a weekly basis. On each painting, Kim recorded in pencil the events of the day and his direct observations of the sky. These paintings are meditations on distance, weight and value, and an acknowledgement of the sky as huge and the individual human as small. Although expressed in different forms, one more concrete and the other more fleeting, Sunday Paintings and Sky Blue Kite share the same idea. The last and critical step in the realization of the Sky Blue Kite project was to fly and record the flight of each 32 x 29 inch kite in the edition. Kim made many excursions in the late summer and early autumn of 2001 to get all 30 kites airborne. The first launchsite was a Connecticut beach on Long Island Sound, but the winds were too vague. Kim decided to fly the kites piece by piece on his own schedule, near his studio, in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. During this period, we arranged for Kim to come by my house in Connecticut to collect more kites on his way to Yale University where he held a teaching position. The planned day for the pickup was the morning of September 11, 2001. Already in his car on his way to Connecticut, on a crisp, sky-blue day, Kim saw a fire in one of the World Trade Center buildings in lower Manhattan. He entered the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel where he inched along for an hour only to see the second tower on fire as he emerged from the tunnel. He tried to return to Brooklyn but as he approached the Manhattan Bridge, the buildings fell and the increasing stream of people walking across the bridges made it impossible to drive back to Brooklyn. Not able to return home, Kim decided to continue on his way to Connecticut. He came by my house, and in a surreal turn of events, he packed the sky-blue kites into his car. By February 2003, Kim flew or attempted to fly each of the 30 kites. Not all of them were flightworthy. Three failed and were removed from the edition. The successfully flown kites are each accompanied by a Polaroid photograph documenting their flight. During the final stages of the project, Kim noticed that one or two of the kites had less white than he desired. He thought it would be interesting conceptually to allow the power of the sun to alter the color of the paper. We left one kite half-covered for six months in a very sunny window at RCIPP. The pigment held up to the exposure of the sun and there was no fading. Byron returned to RCIPP in 2004 and with an airbrush he added some white highlights to a few kites. The project was now completed, three years after its inception. As an art object, Sky Blue Kite is paper mounted on a wall in a space engineered for human habitation. The kite embodies a concept and lives as a memory of the substance of sky, a feeling of holding something immense, and a bit of blue that brings us a sense of well-being. Hovering on a wall, Sky Blue Kite allows a connection without the string—in this case, our memory is the string—to the moments when we are free to look up and release our earthbound selves to the expansiveness of a sky-blue sky. The artist preparing to fly the edition of Sky Blue Kite in August 2001 at the Greenwich Point Beach, Greenwich, Connecticut. Photo by and courtesy of the author. Polaroid photographs documenting the flight of Sky Blue Kite (edition numbers 17/30 and 18/30) in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York, summer of 2001, with notes about the quality of the flight. Courtesy of RCIPP, New Brunswick, New Jersey.