Full description from the venue
Haemi Kim’s solo exhibition Black Spider takes as its point of departure an unfinished drawing from 2017, Past the twin trees, then right , depicting the neighborhood where the artist spent her childhood. Returning to the area after many years, Kim found that what remained most vivid was not the house itself, but the path leading up to it. Following this memory, she began building the image dot by dot. Yet the anticipation that had prompted the work gradually faded, and after the photographs she had taken at the time were lost, the drawing remained unfinished. Black Spider returns to this unresolved point, taking it as a place from which to begin again.
The exhibition takes its title from a small house spider Kim encountered in her current home. This spider builds its web in corners left undisturbed, only to relocate when the space around it is cleaned or rearranged. Kim has long observed the way it inhabits spaces that rarely interfere with human activity, shifting its place in response to subtle changes in its surroundings. The gallery’s semi-basement space similarly offers a setting in which the artist can return to corners seldom examined and to the time that has accumulated within the space.
Although Black Spider draws on Kim’s personal experiences, the exhibition does not attempt to reconstruct a particular past or form these experiences into a single narrative. Instead, Kim translates memory and experience into familiar forms and objects—houses, paths, and bodies—considering through sculpture and installation how they shift over time and across different spaces.
The works presented in Black Spider each occupy a state of transition. Upon entering the gallery, visitors first encounter Where (2026), a house-like structure whose interior, complete with wallpaper and flooring, contains miniature furniture and boxes packed for a move. Traces of habitation remain, yet the person who once occupied the space is absent. Whether the house has already been vacated or is awaiting a new occupant remains unclear. Suspended between departure and arrival, the house appears less as a fixed or complete place than as one continually emptied and inhabited anew.
In the ceramic work Fragment-8 (2026), Kim transposes a written account of scenes encountered on the way back to her current home. Fleeting observations made along an everyday route are recorded in writing and subsequently given material form in ceramic. While the 2017 drawing follows the path toward her childhood home, Fragment-8 turns instead to the route leading back to where she lives now.
In a small room of the gallery, Closing the Door Twice (2026) depicts a figure holding its knees close to its body. Having often approached the human figure indirectly through objects, Kim introduces the body more explicitly in this exhibition. The figure folds inward as if to protect itself, its face concealed from view. Taking as a point of departure the idea that “the human face reveals desire,” Kim sought to create a form that withholds desire while allowing a sense of vulnerability to emerge. This gesture of concealment extends to the work’s presentation: the figure is further obscured within the room and can only be viewed through a small opening. By bringing an intimate state into view without fully exposing it, Kim preserves a certain distance between the work and the viewer.
For Rilke, the “house” extends beyond a physical dwelling to suggest a condition of life. In Black Spider , too, the house emerges across different times and places: in the path toward a childhood home, a house in the process of being emptied, and the route back to a present one. Taking the house as a shifting point of reference, Kim considers how places are continually reshaped by the people and objects that pass through, leave, and return.