addresses without names

With addresses without names, Ju Young Kim continues her engagement with states of transition, mobility, and belonging, while turning more closely toward the intimate and bodily experience of temporary spaces. Airplanes, trains, waiting rooms, hotels, and temporary apartments situate the body for a limited time without becoming permanent points of reference. Kim focuses on the peculiar familiarity of these interiors, which is largely shaped by their visual language. Seat fabrics or curtains can feel immediately familiar without being tied to a specific memory. She describes this condition as “anonymous familiarity”, the recognition of something whose origin can no longer be clearly located. The exhibition architecture divides the gallery into two areas, inserting a separate room into the existing space at the back. A half-height ochre wall treatment gives this section a warm, almost domestic atmosphere, while a film printed with a lace motif on the entrance door filters the view and creates a semi-permeable boundary. The result is a threshold space between domestic intimacy and temporary occupation that appears neither entirely private nor public. Within this sense of transience, a moment of pause emerges between arrival and departure, familiarity and estrangement. Suspended at the center of the room is She slept better when nothing stayed still (2026), the largest work to date from Kim’s ongoing series AEROPLASTICS, in which she combines industrial aircraft components with hand-worked glass. An overhead luggage compartment is replaced by a structured and illuminated glass construction. Smooth, ribbed, and sanded elements held together by lead cames recall architectural glazing as well as anonymous patterns that recur across public interiors and become inscribed in a collective visual memory over time. Beneath the compartment are six reading lights made from different shades of white leaded glass, whose geometric structure recalls historic Art Deco glazing. Here, roses drawn in lead and the Korean word for “thank you” appear in Kim’s own handwriting. The motif, frequently found on napkins in Korean restaurants, brings together a publicly shared visual language with personal memory and cultural origin. For Kim, the airplane becomes a condensed space of transit in which vast geographical movement coincides with physical stillness. From the perspective of a transcontinental traveler, she connects these spaces with experiences of shifting time zones, changing locations, and the repeated arrival in environments inhabited only temporarily. Through their interiors, materials, and recurring forms, such in-between spaces can create brief moments of familiarity and become embedded in memory. The collective space thus becomes a site in which individual histories accumulate and overlap. Alongside works from AEROPLASTICS, Kim presents a group of glass works based on textile structures and motifs drawn from public transportation and domestic environments. Upholstery fabrics and lace carry different spaces of memory within them, connecting collective and personal experience. A pattern may recall the interior of the London Underground or the seats of a Japanese airline, while at the same time evoking a blanket from childhood. Through their proximity to the body, these surfaces hold associations of touch, warmth, and familiarity that persist even when their original context has disappeared. The dimensions of the works often follow standardized formats of seats or headrests, keeping them directly related to the human body. Through labor-intensive manual processes and different glass techniques, Kim translates the softness and flexibility of textiles into a material that is solid and fragile, while retaining a memory of touch and bodily proximity. The relationship between craft and industrial production that runs through Kim’s practice is already embedded in the history of these textiles. With the mechanization of weaving, complex motifs could increasingly be produced serially, while processes once rooted in manual craftsmanship shifted into industrial production. Within this field of tension, connections can be drawn to positions such as Anni Albers, whose work reconsidered textile structure, grids, and materiality in relation to craft, modernity, and serial production. Kim extends this tension by transferring reproduced textile structures into glass and working them through manual processes. Hand-worked surfaces meet industrially manufactured aircraft components and standardized elements of public transportation. In addresses without names, transit shifts from a geographical condition toward an embodied one. Memory emerges through material impressions and sensations that remain after a place itself has disappeared. Kim approaches home less as a fixed address than as something repeatedly reconstructed from such fragments, a temporary sense of familiarity carried from one place into the next. Some of the works in the exhibition were created during an artist residency at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington, supported by the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung.