Writing with Objects. An interview with Ji Young Kim

Elena Karpilova: Did you expect to receive an award at the All In exhibition organised by WearHouse in Munich? Why was it important for you to take part in that exhibition?
Ji Young Kim: No. Whenever I take part in an international exhibition, I know that I will encounter remarkable artists from many different countries, so the outcome is never something I can predict. What mattered more was whether the questions that had guided my work for many years could communicate across different languages and cultures. Receiving the award was a great honour, of course, but what stayed with me was the sense that those questions could travel beyond the context in which they had first emerged.


Anonymous description of a piece by Ji Young Kim, with star stickers representing audience votes during the WearHouse All In exhibition.


E.K.: After studying your biography, I was surprised and intrigued to learn that before working in jewellery, you worked in Korean television! Tell us more about that experience and your background.
J.Y.: Before becoming a jewellery artist, I worked for almost twenty years as a television and radio writer for several Korean broadcasting networks, including KBS. My work involved developing ideas, conducting research, interviewing people, and shaping the entire structure of a programme — from narration and scripts to the presenter's questions and transitions.


Winter Interview for the release of the film ‘Green Fish’ on a KBS (Korea’s national broadcaster) radio programme, South Korea. From left, clockwise: Ji Young Kim, producer Yeo Kyun-dong, director Lee Chang-dong, actor Moon Sung-keun, and actor Han Suk-kyu. February, 1997.


I worked across current affairs, music, educational, information, and drama programmes. A broadcasting writer does far more than write dialogue. Every episode begins with identifying a subject, researching it, finding contributors, conducting interviews, and building a narrative capable of bringing many voices together. Live broadcasting taught me precision. Sometimes every second mattered. Looking back, broadcasting taught me far more than writing. It taught me how to observe people, recognise invisible structures, organise complexity, and take responsibility right to the very end.

I often say that I have never stopped writing. Only the medium has changed. Years ago, I wrote with sentences; today, I write with objects.


E.K.: How did the transition from broadcasting to jewellery happen?
J.Y.: Leaving broadcasting was never part of a plan. For several years, I believed I could keep working while studying metalwork in graduate school. During the day I worked at the broadcasting station; at night I went to school and the studio.
Around that time, my graduate professor encouraged me to continue my studies. It was a simple suggestion, yet it changed the direction of my life.


Examining materials under a microscope during a class at the Graduate School of Kookmin University, Seoul, South Korea. November, 2015.


At first, jewellery offered me a place of rest. It belonged to a rhythm completely different from broadcasting. Metal refused immediate answers. It demanded patience, repetition, failure, and time. Working with my hands taught me something I had rarely experienced before: how to remain with a question instead of rushing towards an answer.

Gradually, jewellery became more than a refuge. It revealed itself as another language — not simply an object placed on the body, but a way of thinking about relationships between people, objects, bodies, and space.


E.K.: Do you find any parallels between your previous and current occupations?
J.Y.: Broadcasting ultimately required many voices to become one narrative. Even when a subject contained conflicting perspectives, the programme had to arrive at a coherent conclusion before airtime.

My work now asks the opposite. Rather than reaching certainty as quickly as possible, I am interested in delaying it. Instead of delivering a fixed message, I want an object to remain open long enough for different readings to emerge. One person may see jewellery, another an object, while someone else may recognise something entirely different. Those differences are not problems to be resolved but the place where meaning begins.


Ji Young in her studio during the work on her piece selected for the Schoonhoven Silver Award 2018, organised by the Nederlands Zilvermuseum Schoonhoven, the Netherlands. November, 2018.


E.K.: Do Korean traditions influence your art in any way?
J.Y.: I rarely think in terms of traditional forms or decorative motifs. Instead, I think about an attitude: making carefully, respecting materials, and taking responsibility even for what remains unseen. Language has shaped my work just as deeply.

While conducting my master's research and writing my thesis between 2014 and 2017, I became interested in the relationship between the Korean verbs chada (차다), meaning "to wear jewellery," and chaeuda ( 채우다), which means "to fill" but can also describe fastening something onto or around the body. These are ordinary words that Korean speakers use naturally, without necessarily reflecting on their deeper implications. What follows is not a shared cultural interpretation, but my own.

While reflecting on chaeuda, I began to wonder whether jewellery might fill more than a visible place on the body. Perhaps it could also fill something invisible: a distance, a relationship, an absence, or a gap between a person and an object.

That small insight quietly redirected my thinking. Jewellery was no longer simply something that decorated the body. It became a structure through which an invisible relationship could begin. I no longer think of my journey as a transition from writing to making. I simply found another language in which questions could take shape.

Ji Young Kim. Back of the Moon, 2021, brooch, silver, aluminium.


Elena Karpilova: Tell us about the Back of the Moon series — how does the title reflect the image of the works in the series?
Ji Young Kim: For me, the title does not describe the moon itself. It describes the way we look. Most of us have never seen the far side of the moon with our own eyes, yet we speak about it with remarkable confidence. I became fascinated by that gap between assumption and experience. Rather than hiding something from the viewer, I try to slow down certainty. The object does not immediately declare itself as jewellery. Instead, it asks us to pause, to look again, and to reconsider what we think we already know.
Ji Young Kim. Between the Line, 2019, brooch series, silver, aluminium, copper, steel, thread, and mixed materials.


E.K.: And what about Between the Line? They look like characters/dolls from Vitra designed by Alexander Girard!.. Each piece seems to have its own distinct personality.
J.Y.: The Between the Line series is part of an ongoing line of questions in my practice. It emerged as one question led to another. Formally, the series explores concealed pins — pins that remain unseen. Each work appears almost identical — a simple vertical line, or even a single point when viewed from above. Yet each contains a different internal structure and a different possibility of relationship. The title comes from the Korean word haenggan, literally "the space between lines." More importantly, it refers to meanings that are never written directly but emerge between what is said.

That idea has always fascinated me. When several works are shown together, people often tell me they resemble a group of individuals with different personalities. I never intended to make characters.

Over time, however, I began to think that viewers might not be responding to the objects themselves, but to the relationships between them — to the distances, intervals, and invisible possibilities they create together.


Ji Young Kim in her studio in Paju, South Korea, during a recent interview for the Yuriji Craft Award. July, 2026​.


E.K.: What are two things that inspire your creative practice?
J.Y.: The two greatest sources of inspiration in my practice are language and observation. Language interests me because words quietly shape the way we understand the world. During my research, I discovered that even the most ordinary expressions could open unexpected paths of thought. Observation is equally important. Answering this question, I recalled one moment that has stayed with me ever since. One day, my husband and I were standing by the sea on a windy afternoon. As we looked towards the horizon, he suddenly said, "The horizon looks like the edge of a saw."

I was surprised. We had been looking at exactly the same landscape, yet I had unconsciously reduced the horizon to a simple straight line. Only after he spoke did I really look again. He was right. The horizon had never been perfectly straight. Nothing in the landscape had changed. Only my way of seeing it. This moment reminds me of Alberto Caeiro, Fernando Pessoa's heteronym, who wished to see the world as if for the first time. I understand that desire. Yet my own work begins from a slightly different suspicion: even while looking, we may already be seeing through ideas we formed long ago.

The horizon was always there. What changed was my attention. Perhaps that is why I have always trusted questions more than answers.


Ji Young Kim in her studio in Paju, South Korea, during a recent interview for the Yuriji Craft Award. July, 2026.


E.K.: If I asked you to describe your artistic practice in just three words, what would they be?
J.Y.: If I had to describe my practice in three words, the first two would be clear.

Question.
Each project begins with a question rather than a conclusion. I am drawn to what appears obvious but becomes uncertain when examined more closely.

Relationship.
For me, jewellery does not become meaningful in isolation. Meaning emerges through the relationships it makes possible — between a person and an object, the body and space, and what is visible and what remains latent.

The third word is more difficult.

Re-reading is important, because much of my work asks us to encounter familiar objects, words, and assumptions again. Structure is equally central, because a concealed structure may completely alter how an object is understood and how it can enter into a relationship with the body.

But if I must choose only one, it would be: Threshold.

I am interested in the moment when something begins to become something else: when an object begins to be read as jewellery, when looking becomes recognition, and when the possibility of wearing becomes active. For me, a threshold is not simply a boundary between two fixed states. It is a condition in which another reading, relationship, or action becomes possible. The greatest pleasure in my work lies in moments of discovery — not only those that occur while I am making, but also those experienced by the viewer. When someone recognises something that has always been present yet remained unnoticed, the work enters another life.

Perhaps I have never been interested in making objects alone. What I have been trying to create are situations in which people may discover that the world is richer, stranger, and more open than they first imagined.

 

About the author

Elena Karpilova is an interdisciplinary curator, art critic, educator, and artist born in Belarus in 1987. Since 2022, she has lived and worked in Lisbon, Portugal. From 2005 to 2009, she studied Fine Art at the Glebov Art College in Belarus, and from 2010 to 2016, she studied Comparative Art Criticism at the University of Culture and Arts in Belarus.
She is the founder and head of the  Architectural Thinking School for Children, an interdisciplinary educational project for children and young people established in 2016. The project now operates in Portugal, working with migrant families, and has been presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2025) and Manifesta (2026). 
She is a member of PIN Association, Portugal, and a member of the organising committee of the Lisbon Contemporary Jewellery Biennial. Karpilova is also the curator of the L’étrangère project and a contributor to Klimt02, Art Jewelry Forum, Current Obsession, Umbigo Magazine, and other publications, where she writes about contemporary jewellery, art, and related practices.

Website: https://elenakarpilova.com/
Instagram: @elena_karpilova