JAKUPSIL

Jakupsil is pleased to present Ceramic Paintings, a solo exhibition of new works by Dohwa Kim, on view from June 25 through July 31, 2026, at 29-34 30th Avenue, 2nd Floor, Astoria, New York. The history of painting is also a history of evolving relationships between surface and pigment. Within a tradition shaped by canvas, paper, and wooden panels, Kim has developed a distinct visual language that moves between painting and ceramics. For the exhibition, she presents a new body of flat, wall-mounted works created through clay, ceramic pigments, glazes, and firing processes associated with ceramic practice. While encountered as paintings, their surfaces are neither canvas nor paper but fired ceramic panels. Their colors emerge not from conventional paint, but from ceramic materials transformed through heat and time. Firing is not merely a technical procedure, for Kim, but a space where intention and unpredictability coexist, producing surfaces marked by depth, variation, and material complexity.

Images in her work do not emerge all at once. Ceramic pigments and glazes are repeatedly applied, erased, and reworked across the surface. This cumulative process brings together the logic of painting and the conditions of ceramic firing, turning the work into a record of duration rather than a fixed image. The surface functions not merely as a support for representation, but as a field where material, heat, chance, and control intersect. Floral forms, landscapes, and abstract traces appear throughout the exhibition, not as fixed narratives but as evidence of accumulation, disappearance, emergence, and change. The layered marks on the surface reveal relationships between image and material, form and time. Rather than illustrating emotion directly, Kim renders visible the traces left by experience through matter.

Kim's practice invites a reconsideration of familiar distinctions between painting and ceramics. By treating fired clay as a pictorial surface, she explores a space where the material language of ceramics and the image-making traditions of painting converge. In this context, Ceramic Paintings serves not only as the title of the exhibition, but also as a description of the processes through which the works are made. Presenting a recent body of work focused on surface, material transformation, and image-making, Ceramic Paintings shows how clay, pigment, glaze, and fire produce works that function simultaneously as physical objects and pictorial spaces. Through these layered surfaces, viewers encounter not only finished images, but the time and processes embedded within them.