The Art of Temporary

Ju Young Kim is an artist of an in-between world. She and I talked about this over the summer, because I was fascinated about how she thinks about time and travel. There is a lot of time travel in her work, but it’s more about how to look at time when you are in transit. She looks at the knobs, the lights, the rooms, the spaces of travel and in-between travel. She told me in The Unibrow Issue 03, “We like to think we live in a hyper-connected world, but in reality the airplane is still the only thing that physically connects you to a different country, culture, and time zone. That experience made me think a lot about existing between places, or perhaps between different realities. An airplane feels like a space of transition. It doesn’t belong to either where you've left or where you’re going.” 

Kim’s new show, addresses without names, on view at max goelitz in Munich, continues on her incredibly detailed and often-subversive exploration of the art of transition. Perhaps better said, is the art of the temporary. When we spoke, Ju Young Kim she was in the middle of a residency at Pilchuck, jet-lagged from Munich to Seoul to Seattle, and she described these places as ones that “try to make you feel comfortable, but it creates a weird mood.” Homey, she said, but not really home. I thought about that again when I saw the works in her new show in Munich: the title is almost the thesis. These are the addresses we pass through for a night, a flight or a wait, and none of them ever takes our name.

What has changed since our conversation is where the work looks. Here earlier Aeroplastics pieces were built from the airframe itself, the window, the emergency door and the reading light, with glass set into the hardware of flight. Here the subject moves from the aircraft to the body inside it: seat fabric, curtains, lace, the blanket that was always a little too small. The gallery calls the condition “anonymous familiarity,” the recognition of something whose origin you can no longer locate. A pattern might belong to a train seat or to a childhood bed, and you can’t tell which. Anyone who has sat in a terminal at dusk knows that feeling, even if they’ve never had a name for it.

Then there’s the glass, which is where the contradiction gets interesting. Kim translates the softest things we touch, upholstery and lace, into a material that is rigid, fragile, and built to outlast almost anything. She told me glass is neither quite liquid nor solid, that old church windows are still slowly sagging after centuries. It’s the right medium for a show about the temporary, because it doesn’t deny that things pass. It holds them in the moment they were passing. The works carry titles like She slept better when nothing stayed still and The blanket was always a little too small for him, small sentences about people we never meet, as if each object had been pulled out of a stranger’s life and kept.

That, to me, is the art of the temporary. Kim doesn’t make monuments to places that matter. She makes lasting objects out of places built to be forgotten: the rental, the hotel room, the departure lounge, the seat you’ll never sit in again. When I asked where home was, she said that in Seoul she misses Munich, and in Munich she misses Seoul. Her new work suggests that this isn’t a failure to settle. It may be how most of us live now, with home as something we rebuild from fragments and carry from one place to the next. In my own terminal years I invented a version of myself to fill the waiting. Kim does something kinder with the same material. She lets the waiting room keep a trace of whoever sat there. —Evan Pricco