Sungoo Im (b. 1990) constructs units of stories, both large and small, using paper and graphite as her primary materials, weaving them into solid structures that form multidimensional narratives. Drawing upon traces of life and figures that pervade the margins of her personal experiences, she renders them through the language of drawing. She has continuously repeated the process of orchestrating events unfolding on the picture plane while stepping back to observe them from a distance.

The seemingly incongruous images that appear in Sungoo Im’s works all converge upon the common denominator of her memories. She stitches, crumples, and collages fragments of recollection, orchestrating these wandering narratives to coexist organically on the surface. Through this process, she gathers fragile and modest landscapes that speak to the multifaceted nature of the world. 

In doing so, Im employs materials such as paper, graphite, and sand—substances that are easily altered or scattered. The inherent properties of these materials resonate with her gestures of assembling fragments from memory onto the surface, serving as metaphors for the worlds evoked in her drawings.

In her early practice, Sungoo Im continuously explored how to incorporate the qualities of graphite—its tendency to crumble and scatter in the act of drawing, and its ability to convey different temperatures and sensations depending on how it is handled—into her work. Her first solo exhibition, 《Black Sand On Paper》 (Gallery Chosun, 2019), centered on a series of free reflections on the processes she experienced while working in black-and-white drawing.

Using graphite and sand—materials that easily scatter—Sungoo Im sought to weave them into a single mass through imagery, negotiating the tension between “what to represent” and “how to reveal it.” Her drawings can also be read as the cumulative repetition of countless formal attempts that emerge from this process. 

Her exhibition 《Black Sand On Paper》, which presented four years of work, revealed her experimental attitude toward form through material-based inquiry. From early sketches in which graphite was dissolved, rubbed, or scraped away, to collages incorporating oil pastels and ink, the exhibition traced the evolution of her explorations into the possibilities of drawing.

Another striking feature of Im’s drawings lies in their composition and perspective, which fill the picture plane. She arranges multiple scenes—frozen from moving situations—randomly across the surface. This process of interweaving spaces and figures does not overlook even the faintest expressions of distant or diminutive subjects. 

By capturing the gestures and expressions of figures, as well as the shadows cast by architecture, she constructs a particular landscape that is intricately attuned to the atmosphere of its moment. Through the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated scenes and images, the artist evokes new and unexpected emotions.

The narratives woven among these images unfold like an omnibus, connecting diverse worlds, situations, figures, and themes. They are not linear but rather dispersed; yet, through their very accumulation, they generate infinite possibilities that stir memories lying deep within the viewer. 

In the exhibition preface, curator Mirim Cheon notes that this approach “is connected to the artist’s act of translating emotions about the peripheries of reality into drawing.” She further explains, “By moving between the internal process of memory and the externalization of the image on the surface, the artist constructs hallucinatory imagery, which realizes meaning through painterly communication with the viewer.”

For instance, the artist’s drawing book, which compiles B-cut images from 2017 to 2019, contains subjects that have been enlarged or repeatedly rendered from the drawings exhibited in the gallery. By engaging with these works, viewers are prompted to actively connect and combine the images, evoking emotions rooted in their own personal memories.

Sungoo Im, who has long created drawings of fragmented scenes with distinct titles, presented them as a cohesive narrative in the form of animation at her solo exhibition 《Unusual and Peaceful Days》 (Hakgojae Design Project Space, 2020).
 
Her four-part video work ‘Hidden Mountain’ (2020) transforms a series of drawings inspired by the ancestral mountain she used to climb, where she explored the effects of combining paint and graphite. The work depicts seemingly trivial moments on the mountain: for instance, a scene of a priest conducting mass while someone quietly stacks stones nearby. 

The animation unfolds with cairns scattering and returning to their place, a bird flying along the same trajectory, and people laboring without rest. Figures, animals, and flashes of light in the darkness merge to create a landscape both uncanny and beautiful.

This formal experimentation continued in her solo exhibition 《A Flower Which Can't Even Be Seen: Excavating Footprints》 (SeMA Storage, 2022). The exhibition begins with the final line of Yi Sang’s poem Cliff. In this show, Sungoo Im discovered a resonance between the act of gathering scattered elements and the narrator’s search for the unseen flower, tracing its elusive presence.

For this exhibition, Im envisioned SeMA Storage as a single expansive canvas and attempted to articulate her work by spatially arranging elements that had long existed both inside and outside her drawings. The gallery, divided into two sections, featured graphite drawings and collages oscillating between form and formlessness. 

In Exhibition Room 4, the drawings—recomposed from fragments—were installed in a tunnel-like formation, separated from the wooden grid structure, as if stepping forward to greet the viewers. Facing drawings drew closer or receded depending on the visitor’s movement, functioning as both an entrance to and an exit from the immersive narrative world Im unfolded within SeMA Storage.

Exhibition Room 5 was designed so that visitors could step onto the paper-covered floor and view the drawings suspended from the ceiling and wooden structures from multiple perspectives. As if materializing a mythical realm within a real space, shapes of giant owls and butterflies, legendary creatures, and the trees of the forests they inhabit—boldly torn and collaged from paper—inhabited the space. 

The installation emphasized flexibility and variability, encouraging visitors to freely wander and interpret, while simultaneously suspending judgment until the specific forms fully revealed themselves, guiding the audience through a multi-layered narrative journey.

In this way, Sungoo Im’s exploration of media extends beyond graphite to include paper. By physically tearing paper to fragment memories, or by assembling pieces three-dimensionally like a canyon, she creates irregular terrains that invite viewers to wander freely through the space. 

In the 2022 group exhibition 《Touch Stone》 at Shinhan Gallery, the artist also presented works created by tearing and collaging her earlier pieces. These works stem from her curiosity about “what happens when a preexisting world is folded.” Through the process of transforming paper, new narratives unfold, evolving into a practice that generates cross-sections of entirely new worlds.

In addition, the artist has created works in a semi-sculptural form, as if mediating between two-dimensional and three-dimensional formats. For example, Eyes in the Closet (2023) is a semi-sculptural drawing that uses handmade paper as a support, evoking the appearance of historical artifacts. 

Im thickly layered the paper, hardening it like stone to form a base, and then overlaid a lattice-cut paper on top, creating a box-like structure. Looking inside the paper lattice, viewers discover graphite drawings affixed to the interior walls of the box. As the title suggests, these faint, emerging faces in the darkness appear to gaze back at us from the outside world, revealing a mysterious and uncanny presence.

Sungoo Im’s engagement with paper became even more pronounced in her 2024 solo exhibition 《A Castle Built of Dust》 at Kumho Museum of Art. While she had previously orchestrated the fragmented and fleeting stories of life’s peripheries through the materiality of graphite, in 《A Castle Built of Dust》, the paper that had always served as a foundational element takes center stage in the exhibition space. 

Regarding the exhibition, the artist explained, “Many of the images that spoke loudly within my work either hide behind walls or retreat into drawing books, while the walls erected at the forefront allow viewers to gauge the narrative contained within.”

The wall structures filling the exhibition space were composed not only of paper but also of all materials with light physical properties, gathered together. In this process, the paper drawings—borrowing the faces of earth, hills, crumbling mountains, beasts, and birds—became individual “story morphemes,” forming the word cabinet. The artist then connected the uneven outer edges of this paper cabinet to create sentences of fences and walls.
 
In this way, Sungoo Im’s drawings link fragments drawn from her memory through variations in graphite and paper, constructing multidimensional forms that guide viewers through internal experiences, oscillating between consciousness and the unconscious. 

Her work can be read anew depending on the viewer’s inner world, evoking the multifaceted nature of a world composed of countless stories as well as the fragile, easily scattered or gathered aspects of personal life and memory.

 “I want to show a world where everyday life, neither peaceful nor chaotic, accumulates to form three-dimensional stories, and these can be read in various ways depending on one’s perspective.”     (Sungoo Im, from an interview with leewith-leewith)

Sungoo Im earned her BFA and MFA in Visual Arts from Seoul National University of Science and Technology. Her major solo exhibitions include 《A Castle Built of Dust》 (Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024), 《A Flower Which Can’t Even Be Seen: Excavating Footprints》 (SeMA Storage, Seoul, 2022), and 《Black Sand On Paper》 (Gallery Chosun, Seoul, 2019).
 
She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《The Act of Collaboration》 (Incheon Art Platform, Incheon, 2024-2025), 《Dear My Forest》 (MMCA Children’s Museum, Gwacheon, 2024), 《Stand Alone》 (Gallery SP, Seoul, 2024), 《Maps with PACK》 (Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022), 《DOOSAN Art Lab 2022》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2022), 《ICON》 (Hakgojae Gallery, Seoul, 2021), and more.  

Im was an artist-in-residence at the 14th Incheon Art Platform program and presented a solo presentation with the DrawingRoom at the ‘Focus Asia’ section of Frieze Seoul 2025.

References

• 임선구, Sungoo Im (Artist Website)
• 인천아트플랫폼, 임선구 (Incheon Art Platform, Sungoo Im)
• 플라뇌르, [리윗-리윗 인터뷰#6] 흩어짐을 그러모아 만드는 다면적 세계, 2022.08.31
• 갤러리 조선, [서문] 종이위의 검은모래 (Gallery Chosun, [Preface] Black Sand On Paper)
• 학고재 디자인 프로젝트 스페이스, [서문] 이상하고 평화로운 날들이었다 (Hakgojae Design Project Space, [Preface] Unusual and Peaceful Days)
• 서울시립미술관, [서문] 보이지도않는꽃이: 발자국을 발굴하기 (Seoul Museum of Art, [Preface] A Flower Which Can't Even Be Seen: Excavating Footprints)
• 세계일보, 짙게 쌓인 필선, 연약한 종이…숲이 되고 전설이 되다 [박미란의 속닥이는 그림들], 2024.03.29