Enseoul is delighted to present Liminal, a duo exhibition featuring Koen Kievits and Nara Kim. Through distinct yet complementary practices, both artists explore the shifting boundaries of memory, materiality, and perception. The title, Liminal, refers to a state of transition—where the real and imagined blur and reform.
Koen Kievits works at the intersection of construction and deconstruction, treating painting as a process of fragmentation and revelation. He cuts and reassembles wooden blocks, introducing misalignment and interruption as intentional elements. The gaps between these fragments reinforce the exhibition’s central theme, reflecting the tension between cohesion and rupture.
His practice also involves scraping away layers of paint rather than applying them, allowing forms to emerge through subtraction rather than accumulation. This process mirrors the instability of memory, shaped as much by what is erased as by what remains. Rooted in childhood recollections of landscapes in France, his works balance nostalgia with disruption. Defined by clean lines and minimal shapes, they impose a sense of order within an otherwise unpredictable process.
Nara Kim, in contrast, engages with repetition and reconstruction, continuously revisiting a photograph of his partner’s back. Each painting introduces subtle variations in gesture, colour, and atmosphere, treating memory as something that is constantly reshaped rather than fixed. The back, caught between light and shadow, presence and distance, becomes a site of contemplation, reflecting the fluid nature of recollection.
Kim’s paintings move between intimacy and detachment, questioning the reliability of memory and the evolving sense of self. His repetition is not about duplication but transformation, with each painting exposing something new while remaining linked to the original. Here, liminality is not only a concept but a condition—an acknowledgment that even the most familiar images remain elusive.
Together, Kievits and Kim explore the instability of perception, where images hover between recognition and obscurity, form and dissolution. Their works resist fixed meaning, existing in a space where memory is constantly shaped and undone. Liminal invites viewers into this transitional space, where time, material, and image remain in flux—never fully arriving, never entirely disappearing.
