According to Film Comment, Kim has "a terrific eye, a gift for near-wordless storytelling, a knack for generating a tense gliding rhythm between images and sounds, shots and scenes, and for yielding a quality of radiance in her actors".
[1] Between 2004–2007 and 2013–2014, Kim taught film production and theory classes at Harvard University, being the first Asian woman teaching in her department (Visual and Environmental Studies).
In it, Kim realizes a vision of the modern female nomad—one who travels fluidly not only between Asia and America, but between multiple languages, film genres, and personal, local and cinematic histories.
Invisible Light (2003) tracks the physical and psychological journeys of two Korean/Korean-American women, which led Cahiers du Cinéma to call it "a little block of feminine hardness and repressed anger".
Starring Vera Farmiga and Ha Jung-woo, Never Forever engages the generic conventions of melodrama to examine facets of gender, sexuality, race and class for both women and Koreans in America.
Never Forever was the first co-production between the United States and South Korea, and it was commended by Variety for "Kim's highly sensitive camera", which "turns the film into a chamber-piece hushed eroticism and surprising narrative grip".
Bloodless is a 12 minute VR film that deals with camp town sex workers for US army personnel stationed in South Korea since the 1950s.
[2] In 2017, L'atelier des Cahiers published Séoul, Visages d'une Ville, a multimedia photo book essay based on Kim's feature length documentary Faces of Seoul (2009).