Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Seeun Kim has held solo exhibitions, including 《Long Shoot》 (Humor Garmgot, Seoul, 2023), 《Pit Stop》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2022), 《Submersible》 (Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, 2020), 《Pitman’s Choice》 (ONE AND J. Gallery, Seoul, 2019), 《Potholing》 (Marlborough Gallery, London, 2018), and more.

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

She has participated in group exhibitions held at such venues as Museumhead (Seoul, 2023), Hakgojae Gallery (Seoul, 2023), Pipe Gallery (Seoul, 2023), Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, 2022), Old House (Seoul, 2021), DOOSAN Gallery (Seoul, 2021), ONE AND J. Gallery (Seoul, 2020), Art Sonje Center (Seoul, 2018), and HITE Collection (Seoul, 2017).

Awards (Selected)

Kim has participated in various domestic and international artist-in-residency programs, including the International Studio & Curatorial Program Residency in New York (2023), SeMA Nanji Residency (2022), Myeongnyundong Residency, CAN Foundation (2021), and MMCA Goyang Residency (2020).

Originality & Identity

Seeun Kim has consistently focused on the “nameless spaces” that emerge in the process of new town development, exploring the relationship between corporeality and visuality through the leftover margins of urban planning. She projects her embodied gaze onto the peripheral areas left behind after infrastructural elements such as roads, bridges, and tunnels are laid, and through this gaze, she translates how space is sensed and experienced into her painting. Early works such as Closed Road(2014) and Compact of Movement(2015) depict scenes based on her encounters at the threshold where cities are constructed and dismantled. These works offer a direct, intuitive observation of the influence urban space exerts on the human body.

From 2016 onward, Kim’s thematic orientation moves toward clearer abstraction and a stronger emphasis on physical perception. Difficult-to-sense spaces like cracks, holes, and debris appear in works such as Crack(2016), Leftover(2017), and Inactivate(2019), gradually transforming the correspondence between the city’s structure and the body into abstract forms. Rather than representing specific landscapes, these scenes become visual constructions of spatial dynamics that combine structure, temporality, and embodied intuition—an articulation of ontological sensations emerging between the individual and the urban environment.

Style & Contents

Kim’s paintings are constructed through the interaction between painterly forms and bodily perception. She centers her practice on the “attitude” of viewing space, trained through visual and physical exercises. Her “Feet of Integrity” project, initiated in 2011, documented spatial forms through more than 300 drawings generated by walking repetitive paths and maintaining fixed points of view—an approach that laid the conceptual groundwork for works like Closed Road,  where the relationship between the city and the body is translated into painterly language.

Over time, her practice transitions from figuration to abstraction. In the solo exhibition 《 Pitman’s Choic)》(2019, ONE AND J. Gallery), cross-sections of roads, tunnels, and bridges are no longer identifiable urban objects but are presented as abstract patterns and sensorial masses. Subsequent solo exhibitions such as 《Submersible》(2020, Kumho Museum of Art) and 《Pit Stop》(2022, DOOSAN Gallery) included sculptural elements that actively engage the viewer’s body within the exhibition space. In works like Lines for closure(2022) and Pit Stop(2020–2023), internal anatomical forms reminiscent of color X-rays emerge on the canvas, shifting the core subject of her paintings to the bodily responses triggered by urban space.

Topography & Continuity

Kim has consistently taken the residual spaces of urban structures as her subject, constructing sensory relationships between physical space and the body through painting. This approach demonstrates how painting can operate not just as a representational image but as a mode of “sensory reasoning” about urban environments. Starting with concrete locations as seen in early works like Compact of Movement, and moving toward more abstract forms in later works such as Inactivate and Pit Stop, she has steadily expanded the expressive spectrum of her visual language by shedding the vestiges of figuration.

She now occupies a distinct position within the contemporary art landscape, navigating both a critical sensitivity to urban structure and the potential of painting as a means of sensory training. In particular, her approach to reconstructing spatial structure through bodily perception functions as a response to the desensitization caused by contemporary urban experience.