3-B Gallery, CICA Museum
June 25 – 29, 2025
2025.6.25 – 29
Husk of the Heart
As a contemporary artist, I work in multi-dimensional forms of media such as paper, screen, installation and performance. My recent work focuses on the textures and images created by the crumpling and tearing of paper, which has been a conceptual motif in my work for a long time. The crumpled paper resembles myself as a fragile, fragmented, and peripheral being. Crumpling, tearing, and reassembling the paper to create an image feels like outing myself from the inner world. Just as a caterpillar sheds its chrysalis as it grows and a tree sheds its bark, so do I capture the traces of my life. May they resonate with someone. In this exhibition, I introduce my new lifelong project, <Mindful Sketches> with some of my early works. I began the lifelong project on October 1st, 2024 to document the images of my unconscious mind. Each month, I deconstruct my ego by crumpling and unfolding 30-40 sheets of paper as a ritual practice while expressing my feelings and thoughts about the daily moment through intuitive writing and drawing. Finally, I finish by erasing traces of that expression, distancing the image from being read and understood. All the drawings are archived in paper strips, connected by month, and created into an animated sequence based on the sketched order. Through this lifelong process, I try to reflect on my unconscious mind, leaving only fragmentary residue of its existence. The bark that a tree sheds as it grows looks beautiful just the way it is. And so do we as we live today, crumpling, unfolding, drawing, writing and erasing.
Alex Jaehyun Kim (b. 1988) is a Korean-American contemporary artist living in South Korea. His work mainly explores the philosophical concept of ‘ontology’ and how practice and medium/media of art sustain our sense of living. He is interested in the physical and analog sense of media in contrast to digital. He works in various forms of media, such as drawings, moving images, installation, and performance. He earned a BFA in Film/Animation/Video at the Rhode Island School of Design in the United States. He studied media arts and earned an MFA at the Yonsei Graduate School of Communication and Arts in South Korea. As an extension of his art practice, he studied further in the philosophy of aesthetic pedagogy in the PhD program at Seoul National University in South Korea. Currently, he works as an individual artist and an educator specializing in the theme of ‘self-exploration with coexistence.’
