Hyein Kim
Painting, sculpture
Hyein Kim (b. 1999, South Korea) is a visual artist working across painting, drawing, ceramics, and installation. She studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, where she developed a multidisciplinary practice that combines image-making with spatial and material experimentation, working under Professors Reto Boller and Volker Lehnert, and as a guest student at the Weissensee Academy of Art Berlin.
Her work is rooted in storytelling and narrative structures, often unfolding across different media and formats. Rather than presenting isolated scenes, Kim develops visual worlds in which images, objects, and installations are interconnected, allowing stories to expand through space and time. Motifs drawn from memory, mythology, everyday life, and cultural symbolism recur throughout her work, appearing in shifting constellations across paintings, drawings, and ceramic forms.
She has presented her work in numerous group exhibitions in Germany and internationally, both in institutional contexts and in independent exhibition projects. In January 2026, she held her first solo exhibition. Do you clean your mirror everyday?In addition, she has received several grants and awards, including the Heussen Perspective Young Artist Award at Art Fair Berlin (2025), and has participated in artistic residencies and programs in Germany.
Statement
I see myself as a storyteller. My work does not unfold through linear narratives, but through fragments, symbols, and recurring images that come together across different media. Painting, drawing, ceramics, and installation allow stories to emerge gradually, expanding through space rather than being contained within a single image.
I am interested in how narratives are shaped by memory, repetition, and transformation. Characters, objects, and environments reappear in altered forms, creating visual worlds where past experiences, imagined scenes, and everyday observations coexist. These elements function less as illustrations and more as carriers of atmosphere and emotional resonance.
By working across media, I build environments in which images remain open and unfinished. Meaning is not fixed, but shifts through connections, pauses, and the viewer’s movement through the work. In this way, storytelling becomes a process of accumulation, where images continue to change as they are encountered over time.