Yuja Kim (b. 1995) poses questions about the “visible” and the “invisible” through the medium of photography. While her works may appear as fixed, singular scenes, closer attention reveals subtle movements and a sense of vitality permeating the images.
 
Through moments in which visual experience is transferred and expanded into other senses beyond the fixed frame, the artist explores the potential of photography to contain a polyphonic range of sensations.

Her work focuses on subjects lost due to film damage, the marks left on the body by sleeping, and unclearly detected moments such as those associated with figures who are stopping or trembling. What the viewer perceives may be the moment of a figure holding or expelling breath, sounds of movement detected in stillness, or a tension suggesting a kind of transformation. Increasingly, these perceptions became as clear as something “seen.”

In 2021, Yuja Kim formed the artist collective ORB with Jungyeon Park and Yeongju Hong, artists who primarily work with photography and video. Together, they pursued individual explorations of “voids”—gaps that drift in and out of the body, leaving unexpected traces.
 
Their inquiry into these ghost-like voids seeks to bring such presences to the surface, beginning with the skin and extending to sensory experiences both within and beyond the body, and eventually loosely connecting to landscapes beyond human perception—images captured by machines.

In the exhibition 《Frankie》 (N/A, 2021), presented as the outcome of this collaboration, Yuja Kim introduced works that began from her personal experiences of nightmares, capturing traces left on her body upon waking and the altered temperatures of surrounding objects. Visualizing sensations of unease arising both within and beyond the body, her practice actively draws on tactile impressions imprinted where voids have passed, rendering tremors within stillness through photography.
 
The objects triggered by the sensations of nightmares suggest the possibility of transformation into presences that carry a cool tension while at the same time retaining warmth.

In addition, since 2021, Yuja Kim has been developing the ‘Cusp’ series in two parts. The title “Cusp” refers to a pointed extremity or apex and is a term used across various fields such as electronics, mathematics, and oceanography. The artist became intrigued by how a single word can carry multiple meanings and expand its semantic reach.
 
In particular, she focuses on the use of cusp in oceanography, where it refers to “a segment of a highly indented continuum formed as coastal materials protrude seaward through the action of waves.”
 
Drawing on the moment when existing entities collide and generate new inflections due to the unpredictable nature of impact, the artist turns her attention to instances when a sense of collision arises within photography—moments when what was once visible can no longer be seen, or when familiar bodily sensations are disrupted. Rather than categorizing such photographs as failed, or denying the phenomenon altogether, she begins to trace the meaning of loss itself.

The first body of work in this series, ‘Cusp 1’ (2021–2023), originated from the experience of receiving a roll of film as a gift that had been exposed to light and was therefore unable to properly record its subjects. For instance, A Cat (2021) was originally a photograph of a cat on the street, but because the film had been repeatedly exposed to airport X-ray scanners, the subject—the cat—was erased in the developed image.
 
Intrigued by the condition of no longer being able to see what had once been seen, the artist continued photographing with these damaged films over the course of a year. During this process, she encountered the idea that illuminating erased and emptied states could resemble an “act of mourning,” which led her to begin imagining moments in which something might be filled in and regenerated while still leaving traces of loss intact.
 
Yuja Kim expresses this experience of collision through the uneven cut edges and coarse texture of handmade hanji paper, and she presents this work unframed, with the wish that the vanished cat might move freely.

While ‘Cusp 1’ focuses on loss and regeneration through the point of a vanished subject, ‘Cusp 2’ (2021–2024) turns to themes of stillness and vibration. Seeking to activate the sensation of trembling through the body, Yuja Kim employs multiple photographs of a figure presumed to be the same individual.
 
Having long selected a single “best” image in order to avoid redundancy or over-explanation, the artist departs from this inertia in this series, attempting instead to create continuity through multiple images. Here, continuity emerges not from action or event, but from the multiplicity of viewpoints.

In producing ‘Cusp 2,’ the artist centered her inquiry on the phrase “the sound of a submerged world briefly awakening,” contemplating how such a moment might be visualized. She focused on the fact that sound is a sensory experience transmitted through vibration as waves, approaching it not through hearing but through concepts of vision and touch.
 
Accordingly, she explored ways to express sound sensations that evoke movement—sounds that grow louder and softer, rise and fall, gather and disperse, draw nearer and recede—within the basic framework of paper and frames.

For example, she would arrange five photographs at regular intervals while modulating their intensity by varying the image size, the type of paper, and the thickness of the frames. In works featuring figures, she often envisioned a musical staff, freely adjusting spacing and vertical placement. In this context, the titles of the photographs, which include musical notes, allude to the artist’s use of sound as a reference during the working process.

The 2023 solo exhibition 《Sister City: Off the Map》, held at Space Cadalogs, grew out of the artist’s chance encounter with the history of sister cities while walking through the city, and is grounded in her experience of exploring Daejeon and Kaohsiung—two cities connected through a “friendship city” relationship, a subcategory of sister-city partnerships.
 
Traveling between Daejeon and Kaohsiung, Yuja Kim recorded moments of chance and incidental encounters through photography. Ironically, however, none of these photographs function as distinctive signs that specifically point to Daejeon or Kaohsiung as cities.

This approach aligns with the artist’s intention to resist our gaze becoming trapped within fixed images or bound to specific meanings by following indices. Such an intention is also evident in her adherence to an impersonal viewpoint—one that belongs to no one—rather than a first-person perspective that asserts the exclusive authority of photography or the primacy of the creator.
 
As a result, images in her work do not settle into singular meanings, and relationships are neither intimate nor enduring. They simply encounter the artist by chance, briefly sharing a coordinate of time and space, forming connections that are momentarily made and then released.

Furthermore, rather than relying on representational maps composed of established symbols to determine location and direction while traveling between the two cities, the artist chose to deviate from prescribed routes, shaping her own paths through walking—modulating speed and time in the process. Through this approach, she repositioned unnamed places that had been discarded or omitted from maps into the role of speakers, each carrying its own evocative story.
 
The scenes encountered while walking without consulting the maps that structured 《Sister City: Off the Map》, along with figures that maintain a connection to specific places yet appear visually untethered from them, create spaces for reflection on an “outside” that resists being captured within the frame, emerging within a loose constellation of relations.

In this way, Yuja Kim has explored sensory moments that extend beyond the single frame of photography, considering ways to deepen this exploration through the material qualities of paper, variations of framing, and installation methods that respond to space.
 
At the 《DOOSAN Art Lab Exhibition 2025》, held at DOOSAN Gallery in 2025, Kim arranged her works throughout the space to form a fluid, temporary “square.” Among them, the ‘Night Writing’ (2024–2025) series takes as its point of departure a cipher system devised by the former soldier Charles Barbier, which enabled the exchange of information on dark battlefields without speaking aloud.
 
From this story, the artist focuses on the possibility of new forms of language that emerge when encountering a state of darkness in which nothing can be seen, imagining scenes in which attempts are made toward what is commonly perceived as impossible. The eponymous work Night Writing (2024) captures a moment that calls inward while reaching outward, expressing sound through photography.

Rather than reproducing sound itself in order to summon it within the image, Yuja Kim sought to move beyond the frame through the gesture of invocation. Accordingly, the photograph captures the hand flute technique—a method of producing a whistling sound using one’s hands—leaving a contemplative margin that invites viewers to imagine the time that follows.
 
This loose and temporary square, composed of such works, leads us to collectively imagine and wait for something once lost, or for a scene we believe may yet arrive.

In this way, Yuja Kim attends to the imagination prompted by what lies behind images compressed onto the flat surface of paper. To this end, she examines the fissures between what is perceived and what is remembered, moving back and forth between what is filled and what is emptied, and uses the camera to capture sensations of presence and absence drifting along these boundaries.
 
Her photographs may at first appear as fixed, motionless images, yet the longer one looks, the more they seem to generate subtle visual vibrations, as if minute movements were rippling across the surface. These vibrations shift from the visual to the tactile, and further into auditory imagination, leaving new afterimages within our memory.

 “I am curious about—and look forward to—the moments when senses once thought to be singular are transferred through collisions both large and small.”   (Yuja Kim, from a BE(ATTITUDE) interview)

Yuja Kim graduated from the Department of Photography at Chung-Ang University and completed the MFA at the Korea National University of Arts. Her solo exhibition includes 《Sister City: Off the Map》 (Space Cadalogs, Seoul, 2023). Her two-person exhibitions include 《Winter bud》 (Gongjaksaebang, Seoul, 2025) and 《Oh, Night and I’ll Come to You》 (Hapjungjigu, Seoul, 2024).
 
She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Fever State》 (Roma Arte in Nuvola, Rome, 2025), 《DOOSAN Art Lab Exhibition 2025》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2025), 《Perigee Winter Show 2024》 (Perigee Gallery, Seoul, 2024), 《2023 Anti-Freeze》 (Hapjungjigu, Seoul, 2023), 《Frankie》 (N/A, Seoul, 2021), and 《2020 Mirae Award Exhibition》 (Canon Gallery, Seoul, 2021).

References

• 김유자, Yuja Kim (Artist Website)
• 김유자 인스타그램 (Yuja Kim, Instagram)
• 두산아트센터, [서문] 두산아트랩 전시 2025 (DOOSAN Art Center, [Preface] DOOSAN Art Lab Exhibition 2025)
• N/A, [서문] Frankie (N/A, [Preface] Frankie)
• 스페이스 카다로그, [서문] 시스터 시티: 지도의 바깥 (Space Cadalogs, [Preface] Sister City: Off the Map)
• 합정지구, [서문] 어둠이 오면 내가 찾아가리라 (Hapjungjigu, [Preface] Oh, Night and I’ll Come to You)
• 공작새방, [서문] 겨울눈 (Gongjaksaebang, [Preface] Winter bud)
• 비애티튜드, 책임질 수 있는 문장들