On JungEun Kim’s Maps, Movement, and Circles
Heeseung Choi
Maps: From Lost Map (2010) to the Self Mapping Series (2016–Present)
Since beginning her practice in earnest around 2010, JungEun Kim has consistently used the map—a condensed body of data, a flattened image, and a form of practical information created by people—as a primary artistic language. Drawing on the diverse forms of maps, their methods of data collection, functions, and modes of production, the artist approaches a wide range of subjects, revealing multiple layers of context, from personal routes of movement to redevelopment sites and symbolic locations associated with social events such as the Sewol ferry disaster, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2024 South Korean martial law crisis. In short, for roughly fifteen years, JungEun Kim has centered her practice on the idea of the map, recording both the personal routines that unfold day by day and the social issues encountered throughout life, regardless of individual intention. What began with old paper maps has naturally evolved over time to incorporate technological developments and new formats, including digital mapping platforms such as Google Maps and OpenStreetMap, as well as other forms of digital cartography.
If we look at the dictionary definition of a map, it is described as geographic information that represents the three-dimensional Earth on a two-dimensional surface through the use of lines, colors, and symbols. This prompts us to consider why the map has remained the artist’s language for so many years. A brief overview of the forms that have appeared throughout the artist’s practice reveals a consistent engagement with mapping. Early works involved carving away everything but the roads from an atlas to expose the network connecting a city. Later, the artist traced buildings and routes onto translucent paper in pencil, layering and mounting them onto glass panels to create floating island-like forms. In another work, the colors of the sky observed over seven days while moving through a particular area were presented as a chromatic map resembling a color chart. In 2016, yellow bands of color extracted from repeated journeys to and from the Sewol Ferry Memorial altar at Gwanghwamun began to appear. At the same time, the artist developed works that connected highly personal points of departure and destination, using those routes as blueprints for black three-dimensional structures. It was during this period that JungEun Kim introduced the title Self Mapping for a series that came to embody her distinctive cartographic language.
From a broader perspective, this shift may be understood as a move away from reinterpreting existing maps toward what might be called “mapping.” This transition also appears closely tied to the question of destination, or the absence of one. In the early works, JungEun Kim used maps as a medium through which to speak about having nowhere to go—a state of wandering and drifting in the absence of a destination. At that time, the orderly arrangement of data occupying its place on a flattened surface seems to have provided the basis for the artist’s repetitive acts of cutting, folding, and reassembling. The roads, buildings, plots of land, and plains rendered geometrically on a map are forms of information stripped of countless narratives. In that sense, they are also the detached results of a system that enables phenomena to be viewed with apparent neutrality. Drawing upon this quality, the artist dismantled maps, recombined them, affixed them to walls, and reconstructed them as three-dimensional forms, as though seeking to ease the difficulty of wandering without a destination. In doing so, they ultimately encouraged viewers to reflect on what had been erased from the map and what had remained hidden beyond its surface.
It appears that the artist’s personal experiences of marriage and parenthood later influenced the direction of the work. In particular, one can observe a more defined position regarding the presence or absence of destinations. While routes on the map remain constrained, they are no longer empty; they now lead to destinations that clearly exist. The artist also becomes more willing to select subjective elements from a map and relate them to personal circumstances. For example, there emerges space for emotion to enter objective data, whether through the changing colors of the sky observed each day, colors noticed in Gwanghwamun Square, or hues collected while moving through the city by day and night. Eventually, the artist arrives at a process in which destinations are marked as circular points and connected by lines to create a kind of blueprint. These diagrams are then cast and painted, as though filling in a solid core that had not previously existed. In these works, which reveal the relationship between what has been erased and what remains as a black form, the artist inscribes dotted lines and numbers at each destination, preserving a minimal set of cartographic information. More than several dozen of these sculptural maps have been produced to date. They are sized to be gathered together in large numbers, displayed, or even held in the hand. From the absence of destinations to maps that exist as tangible physical masses, the many routes that appear and disappear throughout life have accumulated and remained within JungEun Kim’s maps.
In summary, what repeatedly draws the artist to maps is their ability to express and connect, through the simplest and clearest of languages, the routes that serve as both origin and destination in daily life, along with the countless things encountered in the spaces between one movement and the next. Forms emerge when only what is essential remains amid an excess of information. Only then can information be read again directly and clearly. At times, issues that cast their shadows across individual lives, such as redevelopment, housing, and urbanization, naturally come into view. JungEun Kim’s maps may therefore be understood as the outcome of private emotions and memories, as well as decisions about what to remove and what to preserve. And throughout the transition from objective maps to subjective mapping, the concept of the route remains constant, continuing to anchor the work.
Circles and Movement
As the artist once remarked, “My world is formed when small dots on a map come together to become a larger dot.” This suggests that the small marks left on newly created maps, and the way they gradually accumulate into overlapping circular forms, have been an important aspect of JungEun Kim’s practice. For the artist, circles on a map function much as they do for many people: they indicate—or spot—locations and destinations, marking places that carry significance, whether great or small. At the same time, the artist’s circles seem to convey a sense of modest possession. One is reminded of a traveler who pins a large world map to a wall and marks visited destinations with stickers or small flags, watching the numbers gradually grow. The artist’s own reflections suggest a similar impulse. The reason this sense of possession might be described as “modest” is that, unlike world travel, which often requires considerable time, expense, and determination, JungEun Kim’s act of placing circles is tied more closely to the routines of everyday life, commuting, and chance encounters.
What deserves attention are the small events that occur between one point and another, in the spaces that connect one circle to the next. Specific events, narratives, emotions, and interpretations do not appear directly in the finished works, yet JungEun Kim continues to mark the world with points in an almost methodical manner, fully aware that these small dots accumulate over time. As someone who has observed each passing day, as a witness to things that may have seemed insignificant yet undeniably existed, the artist continues this act of marking. For this reason, the circles carry movement, even if that movement is slow and simple. They are circles acquired through actual journeys from one place to another. They are not passive marks placed upon a map, but traces of effort—small acts of agency gained and claimed through movement. At the same time, they become records of daily history and memory, gradually gathering into larger points. In other words, if the circles that appear throughout the artist’s practice symbolize the visible outcomes presented on the map, movement can be understood as representing the journeys and processes that lead to them. To imbue a circle with movement is to metaphorically reveal that its origins lie beyond the circle as a mere geometric form.
A notable aspect of JungEun Kim’s recent solo exhibition Spin–Spot (2025) at CR Collective is the way movement, a recurring element throughout the artist’s practice, takes on a different form. Although the artist’s central concerns remained the same—including data gathered while exploring the Gwanghwamun area from Dongsipjagak Pavilion in 2024, the movement of motor-driven circles, and selective mappings based on personal experience—this exhibition introduced large blue steel sculptures made from curved pipes that extended throughout the gallery. The approximately ten sculptures are all variations on forms such as gates, barricades, revolving doors, and fences. By placing these structures—which either restrict or direct human movement—throughout the exhibition space, the artist introduces movement not only through the sculptures themselves but also through the circulation patterns they generate. As these different metaphors of movement overlap, one is prompted to consider whether the contrast between the light, continuous motion of the motor-driven circles and the heavy presence of the steel sculptures reflects the weight of the social issues that have long occupied the artist’s practice.
The rhythmic sense of movement that has long emerged through circles, together with the artist’s preference for refined and carefully resolved forms, has often invited interpretations of JungEun Kim’s work through the lens of design. This may stem from a process that shares certain affinities with design itself: condensing large amounts of information and translating them into images. The visual economy of the work has also tended to reinforce a sense of lightness and fluidity. The materials the artist has consistently chosen—tracing paper, acrylic, transparent film, and rigid urethane—all possess qualities that avoid excessive weight. For this reason, the steel sculptures presented in the recent solo exhibition may represent a significant shift, and one that warrants further attention. Perhaps they reflect an additional layer of interpretation shaped by the 2024 South Korean martial law crisis. If so, new questions emerge: How might the artist address narratives that extend beyond the individual in future work? Will those concerns continue to remain part of the practice?
The maps of JungEun Kim that we have examined through the lenses of circles and movement ultimately speak with candor: this is the geography of the world as I have seen and experienced it. Without stating so directly, they tell us of time spent in cities on the verge of disappearance, of driving along the urban periphery, and of walking through the centers of some of the most charged events in recent history. Viewed from a broader perspective, these experiences may represent only fragments—partial views seen through circular openings cut from a much larger whole. Yet the artist continues to identify the most viable route toward each day’s destination, accumulating the act of following it. In order to give form to these continually changing personal experiences, JungEun Kim has expanded the practice into sculpture and installation, experimenting with diverse forms of data mapping as well as AI technologies. It is impossible to predict exactly how complex these maps may become, or what new events and encounters life may place along their path. What remains certain, however, is that the blue circles on the artist’s world map continue to multiply, day after day.
Heeseung Choi (Independent Curator)
Independent curator Heeseung Choi primarily organizes exhibitions and writes about artists and exhibitions that have particularly resonated with her. She worked as a curator at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (2015–2020) and at Doosan Gallery (2020–2023), where she curated numerous exhibitions. In 2024, she co-curated NJP COMMISSION: Humming Chorus at the Nam June Paik Art Center. While serving as a guest curator at Billytown in the Netherlands, she also curated The Sea We Want to See Part 1 (Korea Foundation Gallery, 2024) and The Sea We Want to See Part 2 (Billytown, 2024).
