Hyehyeon Kwon

South-Korean Visual Artist

01.08.2021  -  31.10.2021

Summer/fall 2021 Artist-in-Residence Hyehyeon Kwon (1990, South Korea) is a ceramic/installation artist living and working in Seoul who joined SomoS supported by an exchange grant from the Arts Council Korea – ARKO.

In her interdisciplinary work, the artist aims to cross the boundaries between ceramics as a craft and as art, presenting it as a contemporary art form despite its traditional and classical associations. Creating installation art based on drawing, ceramics, and painting materials, she is interested in movement, space, and the place of individuals, often represented by dots.

Hyehyeon Kwon by Polina Akindinova
Hyehyeon Kwon by Polina Akindinova

In her work, Hyehyeon Kwon draws inspiration from big cities and the signs and symbols that guide the movement of its inhabitants. She achieves a creative interpretation of this structure by appropriating universal and recognizable elements, working with the notion of the “unit,” one of which is the dot. The dot is an essential and returning symbol in her work. As the artist explains: “One dot is an individual and a present moment. Each one of these dots “forms the world spatially, the life temporally. The dot becomes a country on the world map and a station on the subway map. It also becomes one pixel and consists of letters and numbers on the airport timetable. ‘Dot’ in my work is an expression of an abstract place.” In Kwon’s work, dots are part of a personal language that in turn creates a narrative about home, place, and belonging.

My work is about individuals’ movement, space, and place, which I manifest using social signs, icons, and symbols.

Hyehyeon Kwon, Artist’s Statement

During her summer/fall 2021 Artist Residency at SomoS in Berlin, Kwon occupied herself with the theme of individuals and their place and movement, concentrating on the characteristics of the city and taking inspiration from the signs, landmarks, symbols and maps that comprise Berlin’s urban informational grid.

In the concluding solo exhibition Movable Point, the artist extends her ongoing interest in the idea of “home” into “place,” including considerations of belonging, migration, perception, and orientation. Taking place at SomoS exhibition space between October 12th and 16th 2021, the show presented an installation of drawings, new ceramic mural works made in local ceramic studios, and a video installation documenting Kwon’s urban research.

In this new body of work, based on extensive visual research into the urban iconography of Berlin, Kwon makes sense of her disorienting new surroundings using her typical visual language of the dot. In providing her own interpretation of the city’s visual language, she renders the city’s signs unrecognizable in the process, making good use of the “defamiliarization effect,” the artistic technique of depicting common things in an unfamiliar or strange way, in this case inviting Berliners to see their surroundings through the eyes of a migrant or visitor.


Hyehyeon Kwon earned a BFA and a MFA from the Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul (South Korea), specializing in ceramics. Between 2015 and 2020, Kwon presented her work in several group exhibitions in South Korea and Japan. In 2020 her work was on display in two solo exhibitions; Hyehyeon Kwon Solo Exhibition at Sanwoollim Art and Craft in Seoul (South Korea) and Scattered Dots at Gallery Meme in Seoul (South Korea). She received various awards as a student and starting artist, including the Sanwoollim Art & Craft Young Artists Award in 2019 and the Young Korean Artists Association Award in 2020. The artist’s Map Projections received an Honorable Mention at the 2021 Cheongju International Craft Competition, at the Cheongju Craft Biennale in South Korea held from September 8 to October 17, 2021.


Hyehyeon Kwon homepage


Hyehyeon Kwon’s artist residency at SomoS is kindly supported by the Arts Council Korea – ARKO.

Arts Council Korea
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