Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Kim has held solo exhibition including 《The 13th Amado Annualnale》(Amado Art Space, Seoul, 2026), 《Ironclad Fragger》 (Alterside, Seoul, 2023).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Kim has also participated in numerous exhibitions, including 《The 13th Amado Annualnale》 (Amado Art Space, Seoul, 2026), 《AMOR EX MACHINA》 (Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2026), 《Space Time Scenarios》 (Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024), 《Dinosavr》 (N/A, Seoul, 2024), 《stocker》 (SeMA Storage, Seoul, 2023), and 《DOOSAN Art Lab Exhibition 2022》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2022).

Residencies (Selected)

Kim has also participated in a number of residency programs, including TOKAS (Tokyo, 2026), SeMA Nanji Residency (Seoul, 2023), and Tator Factatory (France, 2021).

Originality & Identity

Kim Yesul observes how everyday objects and institutions, communities and places, are designed and operate within certain systems. Based on her experience studying product design, she rereads the purposes and functions embedded in already existing products, buildings, and institutional structures. Her early work Artist Survival—Your Work?(2015) reconstructs the career, academic background, authorship, and survival conditions of the art world in the form of the “MCLC Test,” revealing how systematized the conditions required to become an artist are. Later, in works such as The Chambers(2019) and Constellation(2020), the artist traced specific places, occupational experiences, administrative data, and traces of the informal economy, examining how social structures define individual lives and senses.
 
An important axis in Kim Yesul’s work is the figure of the “child.” The artist does not see children only as pure beings or as subjects to be protected, but as figures repeatedly mobilized to deliver social messages and political purposes. Art Class(2021) is a video work in which a children’s choir sings a song written by the artist. Within the form of a nursery rhyme, it places together the difficulty of contemporary art, the desire to become an artist, and the voice of an adult that restrains that desire. Here, the children’s voices are not simply expressions of childlike innocence, but devices that speak on behalf of institutions and languages made by adults.
 
In the solo exhibition 《Ironclad Fragger》(Alterside, 2023), this concern expands through the grammar of subculture and boys’ narratives. Sub zero excidian(2023) borrows the structure of Japanese boys’ manga and sekai-kei animation, unfolding the story of Seoyeon, a child protagonist who must save the Earth. However, Kim Yesul’s child protagonist is positioned less as a hero who freely saves the world than as a proxy for the system created by fathers and adults. The narrative of a child who must learn coding, operate robots, and save the world reflects how children are disciplined and mobilized within today’s discourses of education, technology, competition, and the future.
 
In works after 2024, Kim Yesul expands the issues of children and childhood into temporality and the sense of the future. The two-person exhibition 《Dinosavr》(N/A, 2024) overlaps the age of dinosaurs with childhood, dealing with the sense of a past that has already disappeared or could never be fully possessed in the first place. Chrononex Overdrive(2026) and Interflux Drifted(2026), presented in 《The 13th Amado Annualnale》(Amado Art Space, 2026), view the future not as a single destination, but as multiple possibilities that already affect the present. Within this flow, Kim Yesul’s interest has gradually expanded from dismantling the structure of social systems to the ways in which children and childhood, technology and subculture, and belief in the future organize the present.

Style & Contents

Kim Yesul’s work moves across installation, sculpture, video, sound, performance, and graphic design-based composition. She uses ready-made objects, industrial objects, and everyday tools as materials, twisting their original functions or making unfamiliar, within the exhibition space, the order of design built on safety and efficiency. The Chambers investigates the water supply system of the former Namyeong-dong Anti-Communist Investigation Office, causing an actual faucet to operate and water to fall from the site where water torture had taken place in the past, thereby colliding the history of the place with present sensory experience. Push off exercise equipment(2023) and Sync kick exercise equipment(2023) combine objects designed for movement, such as skateboards and kickboards, transforming them into sculptural objects placed between usability and impossibility.
 
In Art Class, the artist borrows familiar forms such as song, choir, choreography, and stage setting to reveal the distance she feels from the art system and the burden of becoming an artist. The scene in which children wearing velvet dresses and tuxedos sing along to piano accompaniment may at first resemble a school event or a children’s song performance, but terms from the art world such as “performance,” “artist talk,” “contemporary art,” “postmodern,” and “avant-garde” intervene in the lyrics. This mismatch creates a gap between the pure voices of children and the institutionalized language of art, humorously yet uncomfortably revealing the strangeness and burden one feels when first encountering art.
 
In 《Ironclad Fragger》, an animation-like opening and ending, game-like spatial composition, a passageway, a projection room, and sound work are organized like a single worldview. Sub zero excidian borrows the boys’ manga structure of “effort, victory, and friendship,” while Tech titan(2023) deals with the melancholy of the moment a child becomes an adult through Santa, lies, growth, and the sense of loss. In this exhibition, the passage functions both as an entrance into a fictional world and as an exit back to reality, leading viewers to move between animated immersion and the recognition of reality. Kim Yesul deliberately leaves behind B-class sensibility, awkward acting, and unsmooth sutures, showing not a polished reproduction of genre, but how already familiar narrative codes operate within reality.
 
In recent works, the artist deals more actively with the structure of time through video and installation. In 《Dinosavr》, dinosaurs and children are positioned as beings absent together in the past, and the artist constructs forms close to pseudo-relics or imaginary records, as in Crushed carbone-Renault(2024), which uses a car bonnet. In Chrononex Overdrive, boys exploring an abandoned space encounter an unidentified figure who seems to have come from the future, while in Interflux Drifted, multiple voices and misaligned senses of time overlap through a folk song format in which call and response repeat. By choosing a mode of oral transmission that anyone can follow and pass on, rather than precise singing or polished vocalization, the artist presents the future not as a closed narrative, but as a rhythm that can be transformed and continued together.

Topography & Continuity

Kim Yesul intersects design, institutional critique, subculture, children and childhood, and future narratives. Rather than directly denouncing social systems, she shows how those systems seep into objects and forms, education and play, songs and the codes of animation. As an artist trained in product design, she sensitively reads the purposes and uses of objects, as well as the structures of function and failure, and rearranges them in unfamiliar ways within the exhibition space. In this process, design becomes not a convenient and rational solution, but a device through which power, norms, exclusion, and discipline are revealed.
 
Looking at the trajectory of her practice, Kim Yesul began with Artist Survival—Your Work?, which satirized the art world system, and moved toward works such as The Chambers and Constellation, which trace institutional remnants left in specific places and occupational experiences. Later, through Art Class and 《Ironclad Fragger》, she examined how society educates and mobilizes future generations through the figure of the child. By the time of 《Dinosavr》 and 《The 13th Amado Annualnale》, her work had expanded toward childhood and the future, absence and possibility, and the multiplicity of time. Rather than developing a single subject linearly, her work has varied in different forms, as if “modding” whenever it discovers cracks in a system.
 
She uses B-class sensibility, misaligned songs, devices that appear unfinished, exaggerated worldviews, and the familiar grammar of subculture to make viewers look again at systems they think they already know. Materials such as children, dinosaurs, robots, coding, skateboards, faucets, and nightclub posters may seem distant from one another, but within Kim Yesul’s work, they all become materials for asking how certain structures design human actions and senses. For this reason, even within forms that are funny, strange, and at times rough-looking, her work accurately touches the structure of reality.
 
Kim Yesul has continued her practice based in Seoul and Brussels, participating in various exhibitions and domestic and international residency programs such as SeMA Nanji Residency, Tator Factatory, and TOKAS. Going forward, her work will continue to expand by moving between design and visual art, subculture and social critique, future narratives and collective utterance, playing and transforming already given systems in different ways.