Heechan Kim

Heechan Kim (b. Seoul, South Korea) is a Korean artist based in New York whose sculptural practice investigates the relationship between material, structure and the act of making. Working primarily with wood and copper, he has developed a distinctive construction system through which form emerges from an accumulated sequence of decisions rather than from a predetermined image.

Kim grew up in Seoul and studied Metal Art and Jewelry at Seoul National University before moving to the United States to study Furniture Design at Rochester Institute of Technology. His movement between disciplines was driven less by an intention to become a jeweller or furniture designer than by a curiosity about materials and the ways in which people have worked with them throughout history. As Kim describes it, metal taught him one way of thinking and wood another; sculpture became the place in which these different forms of material understanding could converge.

Central to his mature practice is a construction system developed over many years, based upon repeated processes of bending, stitching and joining. Rather than using this system to produce a fixed visual language, Kim creates a framework within which uncertainty and discovery remain possible. Each sculpture evolves through a negotiation between intention, material and structure, allowing forms to emerge that could not have been fully anticipated at the outset.

Kim’s work has been exhibited internationally at the Palais de Tokyo, SITE Santa Fe Biennale, Collect at Somerset House, Design Miami, Frieze Seoul, PAD London and the Cheongju Craft Biennale. He received the Grand Prize at the Cheongju Biennale in 2013, Collect’s Artist of the Fair Award in 2024 and a Special Mention in the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize in 2024. He is Assistant Professor of Materials and Methods at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York.