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 focusing on drawing.

Her current practice centers on pencil on paper, developed through repetition and sustained contact between hand, tool, and surface. Working within simple material constraints, Kim allows each drawing to unfold through continuous adjustment to tactile, acoustic, and visual feedback. Rather than executing a fixed image, the work records how perception and action shift in response to changing conditions.

Underlying this approach is an understanding of the self not as a stable author, but as a variable system of responsiveness shaped by bodily history and circumstance. Each mark carries the trace of a specific body while also registering forces beyond intention, such as friction, fatigue, and accumulated resistance. Authorship therefore emerges within a field of conditions rather than from a fixed position.

Through this sustained process, Kim treats drawing as an ongoing investigation into how perception, action, and attention move toward temporary stabilization without ever fully settling.

Artist statement

I work with pencil on paper through prolonged, repetitive contact between hand, tool, and surface.

The body that draws is not a fixed agent. It operates as a responsive configuration shaped by friction, vibration, sound, and fatigue. Each mark registers how external stimuli are received, filtered, and translated through a body that is continuously changing.

The work develops through sustained adjustment rather than composition. Under fixed material conditions, marks are repeated, redistributed, and recalibrated across the surface. What appears as an even field is the result of ongoing counterbalancing, where local variations in pressure, resistance, and perception are continuously negotiated.

Postponement functions as a mode of operation. Decisions are not eliminated but deferred, dispersed across the surface and extended over time. The work resists closure, maintaining a condition in which resolution is continuously approached but never fixed.

In serial works, this process is extended through sequences that incorporate minimal feedback. Each iteration responds to a preceding condition, allowing subtle shifts in perception and decision-making to accumulate. These sequences form an index of ongoing adjustment rather than a progression toward a final state.

The drawings are not representations of sensation. They record its passage, presenting temporary states in which perception, action, and evaluation stabilize without becoming final.