Objectlogic chain, the title of Hansol Kim’s solo exhibition, is a coinage that combines the notions of the hydrologic cycle and food chain. For this exhibition, artwork produced by Kim between 2016 and 2021 has been selected and categorized. It is an opportunity to glimpse systems of spatial understanding and body-related objects within the artist’s value system, where they exist in intertwined fashion like a complex chain.

In his work to date, Kim has focused on clothing as his chief medium, exploring its potential for expandability. Investigating possibilities of form that originate in the different perspectives assigned to clothing, he expands and reproduces the identities attached to these forms. In this process, he takes materials and forms from the virtual world and artistically recreates them within the analog realm, situating them at the intersection of different categories. In this way, his work has been an ongoing experiment with re-establishing categories of objects through methods of juxtaposition, parallel, and amalgamation.

For this exhibition, however, the different contextual meanings carried by objects in his past work are now gone. Instead, the artist has endeavored to categorize hybrid objects that he has created in accordance with unique object categorization standards established over the course of many years of research. What the viewer encounters in the exhibition is the evidence of those efforts.

This is an extension of the schematic research that constitutes a core element in Hansol Kim’s past investigations. The incisive standards that he has used in the past to compare fashion items with objects in other categories – things like object weight, transparency of materials, positioning height, number of users, suitability for indoor and outdoor use, and surfaces contacting the body – serve here as a backdrop for diagramming/graphing the exhibition setting as a whole.

Undefinable hybrid objects created by the artist through combining objects, furniture, and spaces with the new varieties of fashion items he has cultivated over the past five years undergo processes of classification and re-identification. His acts of schematization effect a cycle that both clarifies and obfuscates the unseen “caste system” among objects and the ecological order of “eat or be eaten” that obtain in what might be called the “food chain of objects.” Compulsive and repetitive, it resembles the circulation of water.

Monoha, the venue for this exhibition, is a multipurpose cultural space that also focuses on lifestyle products. Hansol Kim’s artwork percolates into Monoha’s different categories in experimental ways. It is a permeation process with the potential to form fascinating, subtle conflicts and structures of opposition within what is already a firmly established ecosystem of objects.