Jeawon Kim

Queens, NY & Gunsan, South Korea
Residency: September – October 2015

Project Description:
Space has been the most crucial inspiration and fundamental theme in my art. For me, a space is not just a place, which is limited and surrounded by walls and a ceiling, but the space contains and embraces its own history, stories and possibilities in it. And I imagine that the space is full of countless imaginary sources.

During my time in Sculpture Space, I made site-specific installation works in my studio, an empty warehouse and an abandoned house, where no one had lived for a long time, in Utica. There are many architectural elements that are comprised of a space, but what I am interested in is very trivial and insignificant things, which we don’t easily recognize and notice; smudges on walls, which have been painted with slightly different colors over and over again, scratches on the floor, which the paint came off, and cracks at the corner. I started to see them very consciously and tried to extract, extend and transform them as another third dimensional form based on my visual language. 

About the Artist:
Jeawon Kim was born in Gunsan, South Korea and studied contemporary art at Konkuk University in Seoul and Fine Arts at School of Visual Arts in New York City. Her hometown Gunsan, where still has vestiges of the Japanese colonial era and Korean War, inspired her as a child. The peculiar atmosphere, which the various architecture and cultures were fused in one place, and the striking and strange combination of multiple spatiality have influenced who she is and what she creates as a contemporary artist. Through her reinterpretation of architecture and space, she conveys how physical things are ephemeral and temporal and how remained things become more concrete and permanent. Her work has been exhibited in South Korea, Japan and United States, and she has participated in projects, which were held in spaces that had been abandoned for historical and political reasons for a long time but still contain their own meaning and story. These projects include Art Factory Project, Janghang, South Korea in 2012, The Battery Project, Tallinn, Estonia in 2014 and Rooftop Sculpture Park Project, Brooklyn, New York 2015.