Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Kwon’s solo exhibitions include 《We Go》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2024), 《HOURGLASS》 (KICHE, Seoul, 2021-2022), 《Ongoing Track》 (MO-NO-HA, Seoul, 2020), 《PIECE》 (A-LOUNGE, Seoul, 2019), and more.

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Kwon has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《The 25th SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition》 (SONGEUN, Seoul, 2025), the 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale 《silent apple》 (Changwon, 2024), 《Vanishing, Emerging》 (Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, 2024), 《Undo Effects》 (HITE Collection, Seoul, 2024), 《Project16》 (WESS, Seoul, 2022), 《Dwindles to a Point and Vanishes》 (Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2021), and 《DOOSAN Art Lab 2019: Part 1》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2019). 

Awards (Selected)

Kwon received the Grand Prize at the Hyundai Engineering & Construction S.H.A.A Public Art Competition and was selected as a participating artist in the 25th SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition.

Originality & Identity

Kwon Hyun Bhin’s practice begins with a sustained act of looking at landscapes in nature that are commonly encountered yet easily overlooked. Through subjects such as clouds, water, stone, and light—entities that are either constantly changing or have existed over long spans of time—she has developed a sculptural imagination attentive to the time accumulated within things and to possibilities that have not yet surfaced. Rather than reproducing nature, her work can be understood as an attempt to register the layers of sensation and temporality that arise in moments of encounter with the natural world.

In her early works, Kwon does not regard what is immediately visible as a fixed outcome, but as a point where multiple possibilities are condensed. The ‘cloud’ series presented in her first solo exhibition 《In a Comfy World》(Rainbow Cube Gallery, 2018) fixed the ever-gathering and dispersing clouds into sculptural masses, revealing ways in which free and amorphous phenomena are perceived within human time and bodily conditions. These works articulate a point where the freedom of nature intersects with the limits of human perception.

Over time, her interest expanded from natural phenomena themselves to the relationship between matter and time that mediates them. In the solo exhibition 《Ongoing Track》(MO-NO-HA, 2020), she approached materials such as Styrofoam and stone as particulate “virtual spaces,” exploring sculptural actions that could occur both inside and outside a mass. The works from this period reflect an imagination directed toward an uncarved state—an intermediate zone of time situated between the past and the future.

In more recent solo exhibitions, including 《HOURGLASS》(KICHE, 2021–2022) and 《We Go》(DOOSAN Gallery, 2024), Kwon’s thematic focus converges more clearly on time condensed within materials and on the human act of perceiving it. By rendering invisible time visible through material movement, like an hourglass, or by dismantling and reassembling sculptures that appear already complete, she proposes a view of time and form as continuously generated and expanded rather than fixed.

Style & Contents

In Kwon Hyun Bhin’s practice, form is inseparable from concept. Using materials with differing physical properties—such as Styrofoam, stone, and marble—she constructs sculptures that leave traces of sensation and time rather than directly depicting natural phenomena. In early works using artificial materials, such as the ‘Vertex of Fountain, Sky and Others’ series (2018–2019), she sought to materially fix condensed scenes of natural movement.

The ‘cloud’ series shown in 《In a Comfy World》 exemplifies how chance and intention intertwine in her forms, materializing fleeting moments in which the artist’s gaze meets nature. Her decision to limit the scale of the works—from approximately face-sized to the span of outstretched arms—actively accepts the bodily limits of human perception. This approach treats the inability to grasp an object in its entirety as a productive condition of sculptural translation.

This attitude becomes more explicit in 《Ongoing Track》, where stone emerges as a central material. The sculptures presented in this exhibition appear simultaneously as masses and slabs, holding curved and planar surfaces at once. Dots and lines left by chisels, along with colors revealed through polishing, function both as outcomes and as records of process, visually articulating the temporality and materiality inherent in stone.

In 《HOURGLASS》, white marble becomes the primary medium through which series such as ’ ‘Ice-water-cup and air’(2021), ‘Cumulus humilis-fractus and the ‘Humming Facades’ series unfold. Here, sculpture moves between plane and volume, while dots, lines, and color remain not as representations of objects but as traces of sculptural action itself. In 《We Go》, approximately ninety sculptures are arranged in fragmented sequences, allowing viewers’ movement and gaze to become integral to the work. Sculpture thus extends beyond objecthood into exhibition space and the act of viewing.

Topography & Continuity

Kwon Hyun Bhin occupies a distinctive position within contemporary Korean sculpture, both in her approach to nature and in her engagement with material. Rather than symbolically appropriating nature or interpreting it narratively, she treats human time and sensation as conditions of sculpture itself. In this sense, her work can be read as a form of “post-representational sculpture,” intersecting with discussions of neo-sculpture and material-based practices while remaining distinct in its emphasis on invisible elements such as time and perception.

Her practice has consistently maintained a state of incompletion. The masses of the ‘cloud’ series, the uncarved stones of 《Ongoing Track》, the permeation and abrasion explored in 《HOURGLASS》, and the fragmented sculptures of 《We Go》 are all presented as states that can always begin again. This approach aligns with a view of sculpture not as a finalized object, but as an ongoing action unfolding through time.

Kwon’s work further expands through the experience of the viewer. In 《We Go》, audiences trace and reconstruct form and time by moving along the sculptural layout, enabling the works to acquire new forms of motion after leaving the artist’s hands. At this point, her practice extends beyond individual reflection toward a relational dimension—one that forms a collective sense of “we.” By continuously sculpting the relationships between nature and humanity, matter and time, Kwon Hyun Bhin’s work proposes another trajectory for contemporary sculpture and signals its ongoing development.