Two Circles and Two Lines to Join Them

Two circles are drawn apart, connected by a pair of lines. Caves, straws, cigarette filters, pencils, pipes in a radiator, electric blanket coils, car engine cylinders or the garden hoses of British homes—all these objects can be traced back to two circles joined by two lines. Long or short, vertical or horizontal, the “tube” emerges as a unit within a network of relations, bearing both synchronicity and diachronicity. Hansol Kim’s solo exhibition Turmoil Tube (2025) sutures together fragments of events that vibrate like turbulence and misalign like the seams of an old pipe, loosely stitched in a way that resists clear causality.

I would describe Kim’s work simply as “circle and line,” Kim is someone who immerses himself in clothes—observing not only garments themselves, but also the cultural currents that surround them, poetic metaphors and social diagnoses. For him, clothing is both an allegory of daily life and a rhetoric that directly encounters the body. His artistic practice begins where images and incidents, often lacking necessity or verisimilitude, come into focus again when filtered through the lens of clothing. Kim draws a strict distinction between clothing (anything wearable) and fashion (the social expressions and influences produced by clothing), while resisting the conventional styles and methods attached to these terms. Kim studied crafts in Brighton, contextual design in the Netherlands, and later sculpture in London. Kim’s work delves into subtle thresholds between utility and futility, narrative and lyricism, production and consumption, transformation and fixation. His works, often categorised as sculpture or installation art, are fluid as fashion and structural as garments, crossing morphological and functional boundaries such as “cutting” or “contour” that embody the concept of form and material. At first glance, his works seem to appropriate the grammar of fashion only to infiltrate art, but they never attempt to reaffirm values like the “sublime” or the “spectacle” that art has pursued. Instead, his tactic is to dismantle such claims and reassemble them into something altogether new.

In this exhibition, Kim dissects tubes of many kinds and tests them against the body and space. The tube encompasses all things cylindrical. Electric Jacket Divider (2025) extracts the hidden paths of electric blanket wires and lifts them to the surface, transforming slender textile tubes into sculptural curves independent of function. These revealed lines act like nerve networks sensing the exterior, or organs tasked with circulation, placed within the space. Cast as Electric Jacket Divider Shell (2025), they mutate into transparent skins—an inverted exterior of the interior—betraying their original materiality and utility, floating in space like an X-ray visualisation of conductive wires.

The works flow in midair, Upper/Lower Cross Stitching Cycle (2025) pierces through the gallery floor, disappearing and reemerging to trace a rhythm of movement. Seen in cross-section, it resembles a chart of undulating curves, evoking the metaphor of “trend.” Items caught in the current of fashion rise steeply, fade, and return cyclically, repeating their idle revolutions. Fashion and fine art, value and trend, cannot be separated: people invest time and money to construct how they appear. If the modern self (ego) is constituted through consumption, then fashion—and by extension, art chosen through taste—must lie at its core. The process of re-stitching fragmented materials to complete an intended image resembles the artist’s method of constructing his works. Yet Kim’s practice diverges from fashion (or design) in that he does not pursue a firmly agreed sense of style, but continually forces fissures, produces questions that slip into the gaps, and responds by making forms. Still, one cannot deny the understated stylishness that accompanies his identity as a sculptor within the realm of art.

Within the sensory domains of eating, dressing, and seeing, collective symbolic achievements—once widely shared—roll forward like circles and extend like lines into subsequent currents. Turmoil Tube does not flounder in the trap of trend, but rather tracks where the trap was laid and fixes its gaze on new terrain.

Between sculpture hijacked by the grammar of clothing and art sustained by the cycles of trend, where will Hansol Kim leap after passing through transfers, relays, and reversals? The journey will be as unpredictable as moving through a taut tube or a crushed one that shifts direction. Nevertheless, his task remains clear: to stubbornly question re-established orders, like circles and lines, and to compress separate categories into new constellations.

Text by Jieon Lee