Installation view of 《Left, over》 © PARKSEOBO FOUNDATION

After lying still for a long while, one might have poured a glass of water. Even after moving the cup and one’s body to the table, they would have sat there quietly, their head sinking with the slow descent of time and emotion. At the end of the day, they might have ordered an Aperol Spritz, sitting at the bar in a moment where “togetherness” didn’t really exist, even with someone beside them. On the way home, an inexplicable hunger might have led them to grab something from the convenience store.

Following the works displayed in the exhibition, one feels as though they’ve lived such a day before—one they can’t quite recall but can almost remember. Faded fragments of emotion, seemingly fleeting with time yet sinking quietly within, pulling one’s head down with their weight. Jinhee Kim’s works revive precisely such sensations. When feelings thought to be gone take shape and return, we are prompted to reconsider the boundaries between past and present, and between ourselves and our lingering traces.

In Leftover(2024), a face resting on a table like remnants of a meal becomes a metaphor for what remains after something is tied up—a residue that resists conclusion. Though the title refers to something “left behind,” the pair of eyes gazing into emptiness evokes the “over” in ‘Left, over’: an imagination of what lies beyond. That gaze may reach toward the emotional layers that accumulate between what has passed and what still remains, standing as evidence of presence itself.

Installation view of 《Left, over》 © PARKSEOBO FOUNDATION

Kim’s work does not reveal overt narratives or dramatic emotions. Instead, it dwells in the cracks of an ordinary day. In the artist’s own words, she illuminates the experience of “suddenly facing myself as separate from others” in daily life—a moment “at once unfamiliar and strangely familiar.” Her paintings follow the traces of emotional currents once buried deep and blurred in memory, awakening the sensation of “here and now” through their quiet persistence.

The exhibition 《Left, over》 asks what moments of life remain and in what form. It suggests that the traces left behind, seemingly faint and fleeting, are in fact profoundly concrete—and invites us to imagine what might exist beyond them. Through a sense of estrangement, Kim does not transport us elsewhere, but rather brings us face to face with the lingering fragments that already exist within us. They are the forms of emotion that refuse to dissipate—and, at the same time, the very ways through which we have come to compose ourselves.


(1) Jinhee Kim, Artist Note; re-quoted from Bobae Lee, “Holding on to a Moment of Absence” (2025), provided by ThisweekendRoom.
(2) Soyeon Park, interview “An Artist Who Paints Pouring Light and Round Figures: Jinhee Kim’s Reflections from Berlin,” L’Officiel Korea, December 21, 2023. https://www.lofficielkorea.com/art-and-culture/ssodajineun-bicgwa-dunggeureon-inmuleul-budeureobge-geurineun-jagga (accessed May 28, 2025).

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