Kim Younghyun: Seonjam
Current exhibition
Press release
Kimreeaa Gallery is pleased to present Seonjam, a solo exhibition by Kim Younghyun, on view from July 31 to August 16, 2025. Kim is an artist who persistently navigates the uncertain threshold between reality and the imagined, conjuring unfamiliar visions with meticulous sensitivity. Her approach—painting as though she has witnessed what does not exist, and constructing entire worlds from fiction—lends her work a peculiar sense of truth. While originating in imagination and rendered with rigorous control, the scenes that emerge from her hand feel uncannily real, subtly unsettling perception and reframing the familiar language of emotion.
The artist creates soft, fragile surfaces by blending gofun (powdered seashell) with water and allowing it to soak into cotton fabric. This flatness, which resists thickening even after repeated brushstrokes, enables immersive illusions while gently disturbing their internal structure. At the same time, she engages directly with the materials that make up the surface—the yarns of the cotton and the fabric’s surface—visually exposing the delicacy and pliability of painting’s foundational support. Her gestures—loosening threads or removing the fabric from its frame to let it hang—draw the hidden imperfections and sensory excess behind the image plane to the surface, quietly expanding the limits of painting. Scenes that echo a sense of romance edge toward precariousness; where beauty takes form, a quiet sense of unease seeps in. Seonjam offers a moment to slowly gaze into the fictional world Kim Younghyun has built, where opposing sensations press against, encircle, and cross through one another.