Kim Jung Eun (b. 1983) focuses on the hybridity and fluidity of the city and its spaces, continuing to document and visualize traces of vanished times and places through the flows of movement and methods of mapping. In her practice, mapping movement involves translating traces embedded in bodily experiences and memories into spatial forms and transforming them into objects with volumes that can be physically moved.
 
Through this process, she moves across the boundaries between past and present, and between physical and virtual realities, reconstructing in sculptural form how temporality and spatiality become intertwined and superimposed within urban space through movement and events.

Kim Jung Eun maps sensations and residual elements of the city that are difficult to reduce to numbers or coordinates, capturing them through the process of walking through and physically experiencing urban spaces.
 
Conventional maps eliminate and exclude unnecessary elements in order to systematically organize space and efficiently represent routes of movement. The artist, however, focuses instead on purposeless movements, detours and repetitions, and irregular sensations that remain beyond the scope of such systems.
 
Taking these as new cartographic legends, she reconstructs urban experiences and memories that are difficult to capture through conventional mapping systems into sensory maps.

Since 2014, Kim Jung Eun has developed her practice around the concept of “movement.” In her 2015 solo exhibition 《Self;mapping_Movement of Memory, Memory of Movement》, she presented subjective sensory maps based on her own routes of movement and places that remained in her memory.
 
Kim Jung Eun selected and extracted places from maps that were intertwined with her personal experiences and memories, transforming them into diverse forms, including drawings, books containing diaries and drawings, structures made from cut paper, and three-dimensional epoxy works.
 
Although these works were based on actual maps without altering their numerical data, the artist went beyond simply reproducing maps. By representing traces of memories overlaid with bodily experiences, she created maps that are both objective and, at the same time, deeply subjective.

For example, Self Mapping 141003–150405 (2015) consists of several books made by extracting the routes the artist traveled in her everyday life from maps and representing them as lines. Alongside documenting these routes, she recorded the small events and emotions she experienced while moving through each place, layer by layer, on individual sheets of thin tracing paper in the form of diary entries.
 
Tracing paper is one of the key materials in her practice. Its thin, translucent physical quality, through which what lies beneath is subtly visible, emphasizes how memories associated with particular places overlap and become blurred, while also being recombined from the perspective of the present.

Her exploration of place extends into the three-dimensional work Floating Place_coordinate uneasy (2015). For this work, she selected spaces she had traveled through from maps and arranged them using epoxy and graph paper, resembling an architectural model.
 
Although the names and street addresses of the places are specified, the process of randomly recombining them produces an entirely new urban topography that bears little resemblance to reality. The three-dimensional forms set on the blue epoxy surface symbolize islands floating on the sea, evoking the idea of a “sea of the mind.”

Kim also emphasizes the faint memories and emotions associated with place through the use of light. In Flowers Map (2015), she traced maps onto multiple sheets of tracing paper, overlaid them with floral motifs, and layered the sheets inside a light box.
 
As flowers bloom and fade, the work evokes the way thoughts shift and memories accumulate through movement from one place to another.

As suggested by the title of the aforementioned exhibition, Self Mapping, the point of reference in Kim Jung Eun’s mapping practice is her own body and experiences. Recording the number of steps by setting her own stride as the basic unit of measurement, representing buildings along the routes she chooses as small three-dimensional forms, and extracting and documenting specific colors all take the self as a point of reference while remaining grounded in factual data.
 
Thus, even when she walks the same distance every day, variations arise depending on the time taken, the places where she pauses, and the number of steps she takes. Paradoxically, it is these discrepancies that produce the most truthful maps.

Kim Jung Eun’s mapping practice, which explores the relationship between place and her own body, has continued to expand in diverse ways. First presented in her 2018 solo exhibition 《BLUE DOT : 37’35’02.8”N 127°01’21.6”E》, the ‘BLUE DOT’ series begins with the archiving of movement records and develops the artist’s “self-mapping” through the multilayered integration of video, sculpture, and kinetic elements with space.
 
The BLUE DOT series is based on approximately three years of the artist’s movement records. However, the specific information that constitutes the routes has been erased, and each month’s records are transformed into an abstract three-dimensional form.
 
The trajectories of movement tracked by satellite appear as blue circles of varying sizes and intensities, transforming the data into images reminiscent of a kind of “cosmic landscape.”
 
The works include kinetic installations in which slender structures move while connecting or supporting blue surfaces; objects reminiscent of meteorites, blackened as they travel through space and pass through the atmosphere; and videos that display the artist’s movement trajectories in real time. In this way, disparate media and elements transform records of movement from mere information into a sensory and sculptural experience.

This exploration was further expanded in the 2018 solo exhibition 《BLUE DOT 36”》, held at onground2. The exhibition presents a new sculptural space shaped by the transformation and reconstruction of information about cities and spaces that the artist experienced firsthand as it passed through the body and memory. Information about the city gleaned from maps undergoes an internal transformation through the artist’s experience and is translated into a different form.
 
Sound and kinetic elements are actively employed throughout the exhibition, introducing a sense of temporality through movement. Elements moving at different speeds and scales create seemingly chaotic scenes on the surface, yet within them, a certain order and structure emerge through repetition and relationships.
 
This structure also resonates with the ways in which individuals, living their lives across different modes and levels, form relationships with one another within the social rules established by institutions and categories.
 
By translating records of movement and experience into a sculptural language, Kim Jung Eun thus views the city not as a fixed space, but as a fluid place that continuously changes according to the body, memory, time, and relationships.

Meanwhile, in the ‘Intersection Map Project’, presented in 2020, the artist traced Seoul’s disappeared roads in an attempt to investigate the histories of paths that no longer exist but have been forgotten amid historical and urban transformations.
 
Based on records of paths once created and used by people in the past, Kim Jung Eun visualizes the temporal depth embedded within space and seeks to uncover the historical narratives contained within it.
 
The project begins with researching vanished waterways and marking them on maps. The artist walks along routes that were once streams but have since been transformed into roads, incorporating natural and man-made objects collected along the way into her works. The accumulated traces of movement, place, records, time, and space gather and build up within the work, forming layers of time.

In her 2022 solo exhibition 《Dorr dorrrr》, Kim Jung Eun turned her attention to the narrowed routes of movement and the everyday landscapes newly encountered within them as physical mobility became restricted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
The artist reconstructed objects she happened to encounter while walking during the pandemic into sculptures imbued with movement, while visualizing the sounds collected from the objects and the spaces in which they were situated through sonic and sculptural elements.
 
Through this process, she approached the act of “movement” itself as a sculptural attitude, seeking to give form to the processes through which movement and motion occur.
 
The exhibition’s title, Dorr dorrrr, evokes the movement of something rolling and the sound produced by it. The artist rolls objects such as stones collected from different places along rails, generating sounds of friction, and weaves together the experiences and memories accumulated through the movement of the body and objects symbolizing individual places into a network of relationships.
 
In this way, Kim Jung Eun connects disparate places and constructs a new visual topography within the exhibition space. Examining the relationships between discarded objects transformed into artworks invites us to reconsider everyday spaces that we habitually pass through or briefly inhabit, while prompting us to redefine the boundaries and meanings of familiar places.

Furthermore, in her recent solo exhibition 《Spin-Spot》 (2025), the artist takes as her point of departure the points where personal narratives intersect with specific events, transforming urban devices that demarcate the flow of the city or regulate the viewer’s field of vision—such as lane markings, fences, revolving doors, and temporary structures—along with CCTV as a medium, into sensory sculptural forms.
 
The transformed elements function as fields where colliding rhythms and intersecting bodily responses occur. At the same time, they attempt to detect porous zones on the city’s surface. Within these densely surveilled and controlled spaces, sensations seep in and leak out.
 
In this exhibition, she adopts blue as the city’s primary color, with this choice inspired by the phenomenon of “Rayleigh scattering”—the reason why the sky appears blue.
 
She incorporates colors from street scenes such as traffic lines, fences, flags, safety vests, and cheering sticks, implementing color as a formative gesture that contains tension, energy, and emotional resonance beyond mere informational symbols.

Kim borrows the surveillance system structure but twists its function to create gaps where uncontrolled flows and unpredictable movements can penetrate. For instance, in Drift Circuit (2025), which employs blob tracking—a CCTV algorithm—blue dots representing people tremble blurrily on the screen, as if refusing identification.
 
These are traces of someone and the condensed density left where they intersected. Depending on the angle of the polarizing film, the blue dots shift between visible and invisible states, replicating the exact appearance of surveillance devices, but surveillance remains inoperative. Only delayed recognition remains ghostlike on the device.

Furthermore, the endlessly rotating circular image in Spinning Around (2025) breaks down and intersects cross-sections of information into the grain of time, weaving new structures through misalignment and repetition.
 
Just as bodies moving at different speeds and in different directions experience different landscapes, asynchronous temporalities and sensations overlap on a single surface, creating quiet yet persistent fissures.
 
These subtle vibrations extend throughout the exhibition space, forming an environment in which sculptures and devices, images and pathways become intertwined. Configured like a game stage, the exhibition space allows visitors to follow prescribed routes, deviate from them, and return, experiencing and navigating the space in their own ways rather than simply moving toward a predetermined destination.
 
In particular, the air moving between the works reactivates within the space the vibrations of energy sensed on the street, evoking through the visitor’s body the lingering heat and tension of the city.

In this way, Kim Jung Eun’s practice traces memories, spaces, and times that have disappeared from the present-day places she encounters, revealing within her records the “point of contact between the past and the present.” More recently, her practice has expanded toward reorganizing boundaries, terrains, and untraceable sensations that have been erased or overlooked within the urban environment.
 
The artist’s act of “mapping” thus invites us to imagine more freely the spatiotemporal conditions in which we live and to experience, through the senses, the multilayered narratives concealed within them.

“Just as all problems arise from relationships, they can become coercive when one force becomes greater than another. I believe that the reactions generated in this process produce other effects. The problems that emerge through these processes become connected to social concepts and contemporary phenomena, expanding into my practice.” (Kim Jung Eun, Artist’s Note)

Kim Jung Eun studied sculpture at Sungshin Women’s University, where she also earned her master’s degree. Her recent solo exhibitions include 《Spin-Spot》 (CR Collective, Seoul, 2025), 《prototype overlay mapping》 (Keep in Touch, Seoul, 2024), 《Dorr dorrrr》 (Incheon Art Platform, Incheon, 2022), and 《Intersection Map Project: Walk On The Water_01》 (Instant Roof, Seoul, 2020).
 
She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《The Summer We Call Ours》 (Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, 2026), 《Fluid City, Layered Forms》 (Wooson Gallery, Daegu, 2025), 《Public Art New Hero》 (K&L Museum, Gwacheon, 2024), Changwon Sculpture Biennale 《Channel: When Particles Become a Wave (Seongsan Art Hall, Changwon, 2021), and 《In Every Language We Know》 (Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, 2017).
 
Kim has participated in artist residencies at institutions including Incheon Art Platform (2026, 2022), Seoul Art Space Geumcheon (2025), OCI Museum of Art Residency (2020), and the SeMA Nanji Residency (2019). Her works are held in the collections of the Incheon Cultural Foundation, OCI Museum of Art, and Kolon, among others.

References

• 김정은, Kim Jung Eun (Artist Website)
• 우손갤러리, 김정은 (Wooson Gallery, Kim Jung Eun)
• OCI미술관, [서문] Self;mapping_이동의 기억, 기억의 이동 (OCI Museum of Art, [Preface] Self;mapping_Movement of Memory, Memory of Movement)
• 온그라운드, [서문] BLUE DOT 36” (onground, [Preface] BLUE DOT 36”)
• 트라이보울 초이스, [서문] BLUE DOT (ART SPACE TRIBOWL, [Preface] BLUE DOT)
• 인스턴트루프, [서문] 교차맵 프로젝트 (Instant Roof, [Preface] INTERSECTION MAP PROJECT)
• 인천아트플랫폼, [전시 개요 및 작가 노트] 도르르 도르르르 (Incheon Art Platform, [Exhibition Overview & Artist’s Note] Dorr dorrr)
• 씨알콜렉티브, [서문] 스핀-스팟 (CR Collective, [Preface] Spin-Spot)