Belonging Among Belongings: Daeyou Kim

Enseoul is pleased to present Belonging among belongings, a solo exhibition by Daeyou Kim, whose paintings explore the blurred edges between possession, memory, and desire. This marks Kim’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Kim constructs intricate visual inventories—some drawn from personal ownership, others from longing or imagination. Domestic ornaments, historical artefacts, houseplants, and faces glimpsed through screens appear and recur across his canvases, each object suspended in a state of wanting and remembering. These are not still lifes, but studies in yearning: paintings shaped by the artist’s deeply personal, yet widely resonant, compulsion to catalogue and to covet.

The title Belonging among belongings encapsulates the paradox at the heart of Kim’s practice. His works stem from a desire to possess—not only objects, but the narratives, time, and visual significance they seem to carry. Yet each painting reveals the futility of such ownership. Things are reimagined and recontextualised; aesthetic form is conjured but never fixed. What remains is the painting itself—not the thing, but the trace of wanting it.

Citing thinkers such as Erich Fromm and poet Mary Oliver, Kim probes the philosophical tension between having and being. A recurring motif—the Buddha’s head—is ultimately removed from his work, as the artist confronts the colonial legacies that continue to shape how cultural aesthetics are displayed, displaced, and consumed.

In the end, Belonging among belongings becomes its own kind of list: not an index of acquisitions, but an open-ended catalogue of desire, loss, and projection. Through painting, Kim suggests that what we most yearn to hold—image, memory, time—remains necessarily elusive. And yet we return to them, brush in hand.