featured artists
holding the fragile thread
Step into the tender, surreal, and quietly devastating world of artist, Heeji Kwak
In the hauntingly delicate world of Heeji Kwak, the personal is never just personal. Her works carry the residue of disaster, desire, and dissonance, each piece a subtle siren from the wreckage that calls out for intimacy in times of estrangement. Across sculpture, painting, and hybrid forms, Heeji offers a visual language of invisible threads: between people, between losses, between the surreal and everyday.
Her recent project Disaster Response Manual (2024) emerged from a candid conversation with her partner. It imagines how we might find one another again in the aftermath of catastrophe. In this suspended universe, pigeons carry strings that tether one body to another, collapsing time and space into a fragile illusion of togetherness. Behind them, wallpaper-like patterns evoke domesticity without comfort. The background becomes a quiet echo of Heeji’s own search for connection in a world shaped by invisible threats and unconscious detachment.
This tension between tenderness and trauma reappears in Failure is the Mother of Success (2025), a work sparked by research into same-sex reproduction in mice. What begins as a speculative glance into queer futurity turns into a study in spectral presence. The rats, once symbols of scientific miracle, are now barely there. Apparent only upon close inspection, they flicker in the dark, cast in translucent acrylic and nestled in the decorative softness of a 1990s child’s bedroom. Heeji began the work in the winter of 2024, a time shadowed by the declaration of martial law. To her, the rats appeared not as specimens or evidence of progress, but as lost children struggling in the remnants of a vivid massacre.
Acrylic, often a supportive and nearly invisible substance, becomes central to Heeji’s technique. She merges sculptural relief with painterly flatness, embedding cast objects directly onto the canvas. Clay, once warm and malleable, is transformed into something ghostly and cool. The more she tries to touch something, the more it slips into the surreal, resulting in a faint, glowing residue indicative of memory and loss.
This feeling is distilled in her 4’44” (2023) series, a triptych completed by 4’43” and 4’42”. These sculptural paintings are designed to be felt with the eyes closed, evoking a slow groping through time and grief. From a dead mole found on the street to pets who have crossed the rainbow bridge, Heeji’s imagery was collected over three months in her studio. Indeed, the final works pulse with absence and presence in equal measure, shaped by collective trauma, particularly the COVID-19 pandemic and the Itaewon disaster of 2022. Here, Heeji collects fragments of everyday anxiety, mourning, optimism, and attachment. She fills in the gaps with non-drying, ghostlike sculptures that cling to the canvas like stubborn memories. They express a quiet but persistent ache for contact, for mourning, and for a way out of the traps we cannot see.
Heeji constructs a universe where intimacy survives disaster. Without closure, her works question how to keep loving in a broken world. The answer, perhaps, is to keep threading the needle. To keep making room for tenderness, even in the dark.
