Ju Young Kim

When I was living in the Bay Area and traveling what felt like every other week, I used to sit in San Francisco’s international terminal for hours before I had to. There was a specific hour; early evening, the light going flat and gold through the glass, a few hours before a flight to Europe or Asia, where something in me settled. I had my spots, little routines, an order I did things in. And in that stillness I’d start writing a version of myself: some man on the road, carrying something unnamed, headed toward a promise he couldn’t quite picture yet. It wasn’t loneliness exactly, though loneliness was in it. It was closer to permission—the terminal asked nothing of me, so I could be anyone in it.

That’s the pleasure of a non-place: you’re temporarily unaccountable to your own biography, free to narrate yourself into something else. Ju Young Kim’s work lives inside that same permission, except she achieves this feeling in glass and steel instead of daydreaming. She takes the objects an airport trains you not to see—a seatback panel, an emergency door, a strip of window trim—and makes them so visible they become almost unfathomable, artifacts of a story you didn’t know you were already telling yourself. Where I was inventing a narrator, she’s building the set he’d have to stand in. I spoke with Kim while she was at a course at the famed Pilchuck Glass School outside Seattle, and we discussed, in detail, that overlap: how a non-place becomes a story, and how you materialize one out of the other.