MINAH KIM
Parallax (2025)
Ceramic, charred wood, acrylic, plastic
Installation size : 15x22x10(h)'
Parallax is a spatial installation composed of figurative sculptures and 3D-printed architectural elements arranged within a partially divided exhibition environment. Working with clay, charred wood, rendered plastic, and modular ceramic textures formed through repetitive pinching, the artist constructs tactile surfaces that slow perception and recalibrate the viewer’s encounter with the human figure.
Inspired by the memories of collective calamity that the family and surrounding global conflicts were and are living in, this body of work was created after the field trip to Gwangju, South Korea, and multiple cities in Europe in search of living post-trauma. Also drawn from news imagery, media documentation, and historical archives, the figures are reconstituted as suspended presences rather than representations of specific events. Positioned in states of mourning, attention, and withdrawal, they inhabit thresholds where intimacy and distance converge.
Their gestures—often protective, often unresolved—hold bodies in moments that resist narrative closure.
Through repetition and material density, Parallax shifts the register of mediated images from circulation to duration. The installation does not monumentalize tragedy; instead, it creates a space in which proximity to loss can be sustained without spectacle. In this field of relational tension: between witness and subject, memory and disappearance—the work asks what it means to remain with an image after its immediacy has passed.
Exhibition Review by Julia Yun (The Decorative Art Trust)
Exhibition Review by Ceramics Now Magazine
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