Jaewon Kim works with drawing, sculpture, and installation to explore the intersection between technology and nature, as well as the artificial and the organic. Above all, his practice is structured by a blend of digital techniques and crafted forms, opening up to a syncretist approach that comes forward as a proposal of constructive models of cohabitation. Not exclusively critical, not purely speculative, Kim’s landscape is ultimately one of correlation, subtly floating around notions such as ‘harmony’ and ‘balance’ as the tension underlying the fragile hinge binding nature and technology makes its way to the surface. 

‘The Balance of Life’ points once again to this horizon of entanglement. The exhibition focuses on some of the impacts of human life in the natural world, pointing to some of the impacts of human behaviour. In a series of works made through coding, chance, craft, and machinery, the exhibition splits into two axes - ‘day’ and ‘night’ -, focusing on two important natural cycles threatened by human behaviour: the collection of pollen by bees during daytime and by moths at night time. Kim’s intention is to stress how the untamed use of pesticides has led to the decline of bee populations, affecting entire ecosystems, as well as to how LED streetlights and the bright lights of factories have become fatal traps for moths and other nocturnal creatures. At the Mühlehaus, the exhibition presents a group of works focusing on the first, while the latter is addressed more directly at the Glas Pavilion.

Notwithstanding the division, the exhibition as a whole encapsulates a careful address of the invisible through signs. This is a common approach in Kim’s work, a mark both conceptual and material, mostly embodied by recipient objects such as vessels, not only taken out of their functional environments, but also displaced into a sculptural realm. This is the case, for instance, with the group of ceramic canisters presented here, directly referencing their storing function for pesticides. Kim’s intention is to address how the balance between humans and nature continues to deteriorate as technology develops towards more comfort and convenience. Rather than leaning towards discourse, however, Kim’s slow-paced sculptures populate these rooms with a series of empty objects. Here, the conceptual realm is utterly formal. All one is left with is the material, a sort of monument to disappearance. 

It is important to stress that this peculiar landscape stems fundamentally from a digital archive. It is from this digital fauna that Kim harvests his motifs, assisted by a drawing machine that transfers them to thin wooden panels. This is a drawing that relies on automation and repetition, overfilling certain sections rather than seeking to acquire form from the beginning (that’s how the printer is programmed, anyway). Lines stitch the cardboard in repetitive gestures. It’s easy to understand where the printer turned back, initiating a parallel movement below, as the line bends at the edge and starts again. Volumes stem from density, concentrations of colour—lines over lines mostly, stretches of insistence.

2025

The process is similar to the one Kim undergoes in order to produce his ceramic sculptures. The difference lies in the material he feeds the printer with. In both cases, the printer steadily deploys ink or porcelain in line until the object is formed. Either way, automation is as visible as materiality— it is in fact this articulation that gives Kim’s work this aura of hybridity, of an uncharted balance of chance and craft, repetition and ideation. That is also ultimately his move—to effectively turn this tension into the core of his works, as testing and problematising becomes form. 

None of this is fully linear, however. Irregularities in the paper interrupt the course of the pen, for instance. Where a human would draw, adjust, or compensate, the machine responds with indifference as it proceeds on its course. But to let the work be permeated by chance is also key. In the end, Kim is addressing the notion of ‘nature’, which rests precisely on a notion of difference: otherness. It is the opposite of automation. The questions Kim raises about pollution and extinction are thus deeply entangled in the form of his answers. Failure is constructive, for it shows how automation falls short of autonomy. It is, in other words, a sign of life. 

Again, the capacity to not only navigate this question, but to turn it into the very form of his practice is what makes Kim's position remarkable. We may only recall that a considerable part of the discourse on artificial intelligence posits that human reason will be overthrown by technology at some point, that is, that humans will be capable of producing a form of intelligence that will eventually surpass them. At the same time, moths and bees face extinction because the way humans live interferes with and makes their lives impossible. That’s precisely where the instruments reveal their shortcomings. And that's what Kim underlines every time: through the failures of automation, we can sketch the symptoms of a natural world left without regard and slowly dying, all while everything else is perfectly functioning. 

Written for the catalogue of ‘The Balance of Life’, Jaewon Kim’s solo exhibition at Galerie Wassermühle Trittau