Kyungmin Sophia Son (b. 1988) is based in London, UK, and works across sculpture, painting, digital imagery, and installation. Within the context of technology’s impact on the Earth, she examines the position of the human, transhumanism, and the complex relationships among diverse species, exploring the challenges faced by a post-Anthropocene world.

Kyungmin Sophia Son’s projects begin by examining how advanced technologies shape our social environment, and how art—already influenced by technological development, capitalism, demand, geological change, and the complex structures that constitute the world—interacts with nature and human life.
 
Building on this, the artist seeks to understand the various interconnected processes that construct the world, placing particular emphasis on anticipating possible futures for humanity.

In this way, Son is interested in the impact of humanity and technological development on the Earth, as well as the spatial and speculative relationships that extend beyond it, and considers how these can be visually articulated and communicated to a broader audience.
 
The artist engages deeply with the multilayered relationships between the microscopic and the macroscopic, the material and the immaterial, unfolding the intersections that occur between them through a range of real, abstract, and fictional relationships.

For example, IF YOU ARE LUCKY YOU WILL SEE IT (2018) raises questions of simultaneity and symbiosis between nature and technology, as well as past and present, within the discourse of the posthuman.
 
During the development of the work, Kyungmin Sophia Son visited Athens, Greece. The experience of encountering the flourishing past of ancient Greece, along with the traces accumulated across the city that embody vast scales and depths of time, led the artist to reconsider the transgression of time and space that continues to persist within our contemporary existence.

Based on these experiences, IF YOU ARE LUCKY YOU WILL SEE IT embodies a gesture of “growing out of” an ancient plinth. Here, the plinth implies the prolonged process through which the ground has been continuously accumulated and eroded, while also symbolizing the “sublunary sphere” of Greek mythology, which represents a geocentric cosmology.
 
The layers of time—embedded and inscribed as memory, history, and myth—circulate and evolve within the earthly landscape, constantly interacting through visible and invisible energies. The work reveals such cyclical relationships between ecology and culture, as well as the ways in which social constructions and natural emergence are continuously repeated and reconfigured within their surrounding environments.

Meanwhile, through the 2019 project series ‘How to Sense the Invisible’, Kyungmin Sophia Son explored how different living and non-living species are interconnected, and how, across various situations, they extend their bodily existence with or through others.
 
In this series, the artist clusters various species that have metaphorically evolved, exchanged bodies, and mutated into third forms of being. For instance, Dune (2019), part of this series, presents images of diverse living and non-living matter ranging from microscopic to telescopic scales. Here, matter maintains a flattened state while simultaneously remaining fluid.

This work traverses states of solidity and fluidity, revealing the processes of transformation and progression unfolding across the vast temporal scale of the Earth—often imperceptible to the human eye—while also evoking hybrid images that continuously expand and mutate through interaction with data as an object in today’s digital age.
 
Meanwhile, in Metamorphosis (2019), Son metaphorically articulates the relationships among beings that remain interconnected and sustain forms of symbiosis while retaining their individuality, by layering and juxtaposing materials with diverse properties, such as patterned synthetic fabric, sculptural elements, stickers, metal chains, and PVC tubes.

The artist’s interest in bodies that expand beyond the boundaries of species continues in Vein ver.0.1: Orbital Transition (2021). Through a corporeal form, the work generates abstract movement and complex cycles of energy, revealing a state of tension in which a living entity oscillates between resistance and dependency within the invisible circulation of forces that interact both within and beyond the Earth.

Here, the entanglement of the sculpture is formed under conditions of tension that oscillate between resistance and dependency, relying on the natural force of gravity and the inherent properties of the materials. Through this, the work reveals a progressive body in which morphogenesis unfolds within a state of natural tension.

Her first solo exhibition in Korea, 《Swelled Sun: How To Sense The Invisible》 (CYLINDER ONE, 2023), brought together and articulated the themes she had explored over time. In this exhibition, influenced by Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, the artist sought to investigate interspecies entanglements, as well as the relationships between the Earth’s surface and outer space, the deep sea, and the Gaia hypothesis proposed by James Lovelock. Through this, she explored the intersections and modes of existence between humans and non-human realms, the visible and the invisible.

Furthermore, she sought to address how human development and its expanding influence impact the Earth’s surface, as well as the processes through which realms beyond the Earth and those deep beneath its surface continuously intersect, intrude upon, and affect one another—and how we come to perceive and understand these conditions.
 
Among the works presented in this exhibition, Survivor (on the horizon) (2023), Dune (2023), and The Sun (a system of friction) (2023) are composed of collaged fragments of images—depicting planets, microorganisms, deep-sea life, and fungal organisms—sourced from online articles and applied onto aluminum panels.

In addition, Son entangled electrical cables within aluminum profile frames to convey that beings existing across different positions, distances, and scales remain interconnected, forming correlations even in realms beyond human sensory perception.
 
Through such works, she reflects on humanity as part of the Earth—addressing the continuous processes of penetration and transformation occurring at the planetary surface, as well as realms beyond anthropocentric perspectives. Her practice articulates both the surface-scale of the Earth that humans have sought to control and comprehend, and the forces beyond it that ceaselessly shape the present.

Meanwhile, Dweller (2023) and How to Catch the Big Fish (2023), composed of steel structures and piles of synthetic leather, take on forms resembling vertebrate creatures walking across the Earth’s surface, alongside a massive fishing hook seemingly pulled up from the depths of the ocean, and flesh-like masses caught by it.
 
Through these layered bodies, Son reflects on the ongoing relationships that continuously constitute the Earth—whether visible or invisible—always connecting with one another. In doing so, she invites viewers to contemplate the cyclical order that has sustained the long history of the planet.

Son’s practice encourages viewers to perceive the existence of the world from perspectives beyond anthropocentric thinking. In doing so, it invites reflection on the crises of life on Earth that we now face, as ever-advancing technologies extend beyond the limits of human control, as well as on the harmony between human and non-human entities, and the directions and relationships that may shape our shared future.

“I wanted to speak about the direction of life, perception, and connectivity. I wanted to consider how we recognize the beings that have been dismantled in the name of progress, and how we might understand and live with the time that remains in a more harmonious way.”  (Kyungmin Sophia Son, from an interview with BE(ATTITUDE))

Kyungmin Sophia Son received her BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, and an MRes in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College. Her solo exhibitions include 《Swelled Sun: How To Sense The Invisible》 (CYLINDER ONE, Seoul, 2023).
 
She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《The Rings of Saturn》 (Bucheon Art Bunker B39, Bucheon, 2024), 《Begin Again》 (Korean Cultural Centre UK, London; Koreanisches Kulturzentrum, Berlin, 2022), 《Bow Open, About-face: regroup, reorganise, reimagine》 (Nunnery Gallery, London, 2021), 《The Spring Exhibition – Inhale and Exhale》 (Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, 2019), and 《Parlour Geometrique》 (Chiswick House and Garden, London, 2018).
 
Kyungmin Sophia Son has also participated in residency programs such as Snehta Residency (Athens, 2018).

References

• 손경민, Kyungmin Sophia Son (Artist Website)
• 손경민, 포트폴리오 (Kyungmin Sophia Son, Portfolio)
• 비애티튜드, [인터뷰] 답은 자기 자신에게서 찾아야 해요
• Adocs, [도록] 부천아트벙커B39 - 토성의 고리 (Adocs, [Catalogue] Bucheon Art Bunker B39 - The Rings of Saturn)