Hounyeh Kim

Hounyeh Kim is a visual artist based in Berlin, born in Seoul and raised between South Korea and the United States. She studied literature before turning to visual art and worked across several media before gradually focusing on drawing.

Her current practice centers on pencil on paper, developed through repetition, accumulation, and sustained contact between hand, tool, and surface. Working within simple material constraints, Kim allows drawings to unfold through continuous adjustment to tactile, acoustic, and visual feedback. Over time, dense tonal fields emerge from countless small decisions made in response to the surface.

Underlying this approach is an understanding of the self not as an autonomous will acting from outside the world, but as a particular configuration of responsiveness shaped by bodily history, experience, and circumstance. Each mark therefore carries the trace of a specific body while also responding to conditions beyond intention. In this sense, the work is both authored and received.

Through this sustained and repetitive process, Kim treats drawing as an ongoing investigation into how perception, action, and attention stabilize over time.

Artist statement

My practice develops through prolonged bodily engagement with simple materials, most often pencil and paper. The work proceeds through sustained contact between hand, tool, and surface. Repetition, pressure, and attention gradually build a field of marks. Each drawing unfolds through continuous adjustment to the changing conditions of the surface.

Different projects establish specific working conditions such as paper format, drawing duration, or sets of tools. These conditions remain constant throughout a sequence. Their purpose is to allow subtle shifts in perception and decision making to become visible over time. Through repeated work under stable circumstances, the drawings record how sensing, action, and evaluation interact.

Authorship within this process is shared between the body and the material situation in which the drawing occurs. Each mark carries the trace of a particular body with its own habits, history, and thresholds of perception. The result is shaped by circumstances: the resistance of paper fibers, the drag of graphite, fatigue in the hand, interruptions in rhythm, and the density of marks already present on the surface.

The friction between graphite and paper generates a continuous tactile and acoustic feedback. Slight irregularities in this feedback produce a mild sensory tension that guides the next movement of the hand. Over time this process tends to distribute activity across the surface as the drawing responds to these small disturbances. The visual field gradually stabilizes through this ongoing adjustment.

The finished surfaces present the accumulated trace of this process. From a distance they appear as soft tonal fields. At close range they reveal numerous individual contacts between graphite and paper. These marks register duration and attention as they form the visual structure of the work.

The practice maintains a sustained condition of responsiveness. Returning repeatedly to the same actions, touching the surface, observing the feedback, adjusting the next movement, allows perception to stabilize through repetition. Each project offers a temporary cross section of this ongoing investigation into how a body attends, decides, and acts within the circumstances it inhabits.