Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Her solo exhibitions include 《Tilted Land Even Wind》 (O'newWall E'Juheon, Seoul, 2015), 《Wind Beyond the Closed Windows》 (Sansumunhwa, Seoul, 2018), 《Glow Breath Warmth》 (WESS, Seoul, 2020), 《Scattering Breath》 (P21, Seoul, 2022), 《With Night’s Nape Between Our Jaws》 (P21, Seoul, 2024), and 《Breath of the Mouth》 (PHILIPPZOLLINGER, Zürich, 2024).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions such as 《The Melting Sea》 (Art Space Pool, Seoul, 2017), 《Young Korean Artists 2019》 (MMCA, Gwacheon, 2019), 《The Pearl Diver》 (Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, 2021), 《The 21st SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition》 (SONGEUN, Seoul, 2021), 《Rales, wheezes and crackles》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2022), and 《Traces and Threads》 (KÖNIG Seoul, Seoul, 2024).

Awards (Selected)

Keem Jiyoung has been an artist-in-residence at the SeMA Nanji Residency (2019), the MMCA Residency Goyang (2020-2021), Incheon Art Platform (2021-2022), and SFAC Seoul Art Space Geumcheon (2022-2023). 

Collections (Selected)

Her works are held in collections such as the Burger COLLECTION, SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation, PARK SEOBO FOUNDATION, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, PODO Museum, and Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art.

Originality & Identity

Keem Jiyoung delves into the structural issues underlying unexpected social accidents and disasters, persistently exploring the complex relationship between individuals and the broader social framework. The 2014 Sewol Ferry tragedy marked a critical turning point in her practice, prompting her to reflect on how such disasters reveal fissures in national and political systems. Rather than objectifying collective pain, her work continually grapples with the question of how to speak about trauma in ethically responsible ways. Her charcoal painting Wave(2015), shown in her solo exhibition 《Tilted Land Even Wind》(2015, O'newWall E'Juheon), evokes the tragedy through abstract affect, visualizing despair and helplessness through heavy, dark waves that metaphorically embody death.

Subsequently, Keem’s gaze shifted from individual grief toward structural repetition, examining how traumatic events reoccur within societal mechanisms. In her second solo exhibition 《Wind Beyond the Closed Windows》(2018, Sansumunhwa), she presented the 'Blue Series' (2016–2018) and the installation Attitude Toward Remembering (2016/2018), reinterpreting various contemporary Korean disasters through non-representational language. These works resist the spectacle of images and instead foreground the invisible architectures of violence, guiding viewers to recognize contemporary tragedies through a historically informed lens.

Style & Contents

Keem Jiyoung moves fluidly across media, constructing sensory narratives through painting, installation, sound, video, and text. In her early solo exhibition 《Tilted Land Even Wind》, she transformed the exhibition space into a multi-sensory environment, combining blue lighting, a tilted floor, rhythmic drumbeats, and withered plants to invoke bodily memories of loss and immersion. Her 'Blue Series' translated media-reported disaster scenes into monochromatic landscapes, eliminating human figures to critique the voyeuristic tendencies of mediated representation. These static, pastel-toned images deliberately subvert narrative clarity, foregrounding the paradox of stillness in disaster imagery.

More recent work increasingly explores the atmospheric potential of painting itself. Her exhibitions 《Glow Breath Warmth》(2020, WESS) and 《Scattering Breath》(2022, P21) introduced the ‘Glowing Hour’ series, which abstractly interprets candlelight as a symbol of life, memory, and transience. Works like Drawing for Glowing Hour(2020) and Glowing Hour(2022) visualize the lingering emotional heat of lived experience through layered applications of crimson oil paint. Rather than depicting flame as form, Keem captures its felt temperature and spiritual duration, pushing her practice into more introspective and contemplative territory.

Topography & Continuity

Throughout her practice, Keem Jiyoung has consistently examined the tension between individual agency and social structure, focusing on the visual residue left by disaster and memory. Her early works transformed collective grief into spatial experiences, while later paintings trace the residual affects of trauma through abstract forms. This progression from the concrete to the atmospheric reflects a deliberate move away from representation toward the sensorial and meditative—an expansion of her practice from event-specific commentary to more universal states of perception and presence.

Keem’s work has steadily built a socially engaged narrative within the field of contemporary Korean art, participating in key group exhibitions such as 《Young Korean Artists 2019》(MMCA), 《The Pearl Diver》(2021, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art), and 《Traces and Threads》(2024, KÖNIG Seoul). Most recently, her solo exhibition 《Breath of the Mouth》(2024, PHILIPP ZOLLINGER) in Zurich marked her growing international recognition. As she continues to bridge sensory abstraction with structural critique, her practice points toward a sustained investigation into the lived resonance of tragedy—both as private memory and shared historical experience—suggesting an evolving, global articulation of personal and collective survival.