51.5072° N, 0.1275° W
37.5665° N, 126.9780° W
“I make works that can be touched.”
This statement functions not only as a description of method but as a proposal for different relationships between objects and the human body. Chaeeun Kim’s ceramics move beyond detached observation; they acquire meaning the moment when a hand reaches out and the body becomes involved. Her practice departs from the visual order through which objects have long been consumed, seeking instead to re-establish our relationship with things through sensation and experience.
Her work extends this sensibility into the conditions of the body and the process of making. Rather than adhering to a fully controlled structure, forms are left in a naturally tilted state as they pass through gravity and heat inside the kiln. Such shifts and deformations are neither corrected nor concealed, evoking the human body suspended between stability and instability. She understands this inclination not as a flaw, but as the result of an incomplete being moving through time.
Added onto these traces of time are stitches. The blue stitches following seams and lines recall the color and patterns of denim, layering textile-based thinking and the language of the body onto the solid ceramic. They reveal the point at which design and making, intention and reality intersect. This foregrounding process over finished form reflects her choice not to conceal the paths and contexts.
What she creates is a scene in which body, time, and emotion intersect. The time of heat that has passed through the kiln, the choices and marks of the hand built up stitch by stitch, moments once sharp or emotionally charged, and states that have already slipped into the past are all compressed into the form as irreversible outcomes. Placed within everyday space, the sculpture rests as if cradled by the body, allowing the weight and warmth of the object to be sensed directly.
2025
Porcelain, blue stain, glaze, natural fibre