HOJUNG KIM

The exhibition follows its presentation at New Spring Project in Seoul, Korea, bringing Kim’s recent ceramic works to Singapore and introducing her practice to a new audience.

Kim’s practice moves fluidly across ceramics, painting, and drawing, exploring the intimate relationship between clay, nature, the body, and time. For the artist, clay is not simply a material to be shaped into a predetermined form. It is a living and responsive substance with its own weight, texture, movement, and memory. Through repeated processes of touching, pressing, building, drying, glazing, and firing, Kim allows the material itself to participate in the making of each work.

At the center of the exhibition is a group of moon jars, one of the most recognizable forms within the history of Korean ceramics. Traditionally admired for their generous spherical volume, restrained beauty, and subtle irregularities, moon jars embody an aesthetic in which imperfection becomes an essential part of harmony. Kim approaches this historic form with a distinctly contemporary sensibility, retaining its quiet presence while introducing a more tactile, painterly, and expressive surface.

Rather than pursuing perfect symmetry, Kim embraces the slight shifts, unevenness, and traces that emerge naturally through the making process. The vessels appear at once grounded and weightless, solid yet atmospheric. Their rounded forms can suggest the moon, the horizon, a distant mountain, or even the contours of the human body. Through these associations, the moon jar becomes not only an object but also a kind of landscape.

Color plays an equally important role in Kim’s work. Layers of white, ivory, beige, brown, grey, and deep black reveal the different characteristics of clay, glaze, and firing. Some surfaces appear calm and luminous, while others are rougher, darker, and more geological. These variations recall soil, stone, ash, clouds, water, and shifting light, giving each work a strong connection to the natural world.

Kim’s process also reflects her interest in transformation. Clay begins as earth, is shaped by the artist’s hands, altered by water and air, and finally transformed through intense heat. Much of this process cannot be entirely controlled. The kiln introduces chance, and subtle variations in temperature and glaze can dramatically affect the final surface. Rather than resisting this unpredictability, Kim accepts it as part of the work, allowing each piece to retain evidence of its own making.

Presented alongside ceramic vessels are paintings and drawings that extend the artist’s investigation beyond the three-dimensional object. Across these different media, similar gestures, rhythms, textures, and organic forms repeatedly appear. A painted mark may resemble the trace of clay being pressed by hand, while the surface of a ceramic vessel may take on the qualities of a painted landscape. In this way, Kim creates a continuous dialogue between ceramics and painting, object and image, material and gesture.

Landscape of Earth reflects the artist’s broader understanding of nature not as something to be represented literally, but as something to be experienced physically and emotionally. Her works are connected to the earth through their material, to the body through the act of making, and to time through processes of drying, firing, layering, and transformation.

Through this first solo presentation in Singapore, The Columns Gallery introduces Hojung Kim’s distinctive practice to a wider audience, bringing together works that combine the heritage of Korean ceramics with a deeply personal and contemporary approach.

The exhibition invites viewers to slow down and observe the quiet differences between form, texture, color, and surface. More than representations of nature, Kim’s works offer a way of sensing it—through the warmth of clay, the movement of the hand, the unpredictability of fire, and the traces of time embedded within each object.