Muyeul Kim

Kim Muyeol graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at Konkuk University and has since developed a body of object- and furniture-based work centered on the contingency inherent in clay as a material. The process of ceramic making—sometimes completed exactly as planned, sometimes veering into entirely unforeseen results—has come, for the artist, to mirror an attitude toward life itself. In Plan : Beyond, his solo exhibition at Gallery Kabinett, Kim draws on the actual architectural plans of institutions including the Getty Museum, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Sayamaike Museum as a starting point for his work. He redraws each building's floor plan by hand with a 3D pen and presses it into a slab of clay; onto that imprinted surface, he then builds up form improvisationally, layering planned structure over accidental change to create a new kind of landscape. From this completed slab, another new slab is pressed in turn—so that the shape of the architecture leaves its trace again and again, as if inscribed into pattern. Just as artifacts and artworks of disparate origins take on a second narrative once placed within the space of a museum, the architectural forms and plans embedded in Kim Muyeol's clay slabs are reborn—within the physicality of the material itself—as a new stratum of spatial art, one holding boundless possibility.