and the vast traces of the ebbing tide
draw a circle as they flow eastward,
toward the pillar of ultramarine.”
— Arthur Rimbaud, “Marine,” Illuminations, 1886
In Byoungho KIM’s exhibition Symmetric Garden, the encounter with “ultramarine” signals the artist’s orientation toward another realm. Just as Rimbaud’s “pillar of ultramarine” in “Marine,” Illuminations (1886) was not merely a landscape but a poetic image pointing to an unfamiliar horizon beyond the sea—an infinitely expanding, transcendent world and its depths—so too might it represent for Kim an undisclosed marker, a sign toward the unseen. The term ultramarine derives from the Latin ultra mare, meaning “beyond the sea.” It refers to the deep blue pigment extracted from lapis lazuli mined in the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan—a color once reserved for the Virgin Mary’s robes during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and valued more highly than gold. Fragments of vivid ultramarine—evoking both the transcendental dimension and the material origin of lapis lazuli—animate the massive yet sleek metallic systems presented in Symmetric Garden. Within the coldness of metal, the precision of symmetry, the repetition of modules, and the rigor of industrial order, the artist conducts an experiment in color as a subtle vibration of perception. Over the past two decades, Kim has distilled a mechanical sculptural language that both mediates industrial systems and probes the sensorial potential of art through color.
Throughout his career, Kim has sculpted his own gardens—artificially cultivated spaces composed of vertical and horizontal axes, geometric forms and structures, linear repetitions, and accumulated shapes. His abstract sculptures, while built on rhythmic uniformity, are often animated by movement through mechanical devices or by the integration of sound, which breathe vitality into their minimalist and structural forms. In this exhibition, deep marine blue unfolds across his sculptural vocabulary, creating a tension and balance that meet the aesthetic moment of the machine. Kim’s practice is grounded in mechanical systems based on repetition and symmetry, and on the representation of both information and material. It reflects a perception of the world that transcends the visible. For this reason, his works evoke a tactile experience—an encounter with the affect or sensibility of the machine and its system. How, then, did his sculptural principles come to embody a vision of the world through mechanical systems? And from what origins does his sense of abstraction arise? This essay pursues Kim’s art through two interrelated questions: first, how the artist arrived at the abstract sensibility of metal and the repetitive formal language of machinery; and second, how his art interrogates the meaning of process—suggesting not the uniqueness of creation, but the logic of serial production.
Abstract Sensibility and the Construct of Mechanical Language
Byoungho KIM belongs to a generation that helped shape the landscape of contemporary art in the 2000s. His sculpture aligns not with the expression of emotion or the weaving of material, but with the lineage of constructive sculpture—one that privileges the logic and order of form, and the conceptual reasoning of structure. Interestingly, Kim began his artistic practice with printmaking before expanding into sculpture. The Twenty-six Lines (1998) marks both the point of origin and the condensed vision of his artistic pursuit—an orientation toward abstraction and the repetition of form. Produced as a silkscreen print, the composition is divided by diagonal lines that stretch outward from a single concentrated point. Despite the dynamic contrasts of left–right symmetry and vertical asymmetry, the visual field remains stable and taut. Tension and balance traverse the surface, producing a palpable sense of flatness and taut precision. This work may be regarded as the formal origin—and perhaps the enduring standard—of the tension, balance, and (a)symmetry that underlie all of his subsequent sculptures and installations. Within this early print, the accumulation of straight and diagonal lines, their equilibrium and strain, already reveal abstraction as the very matrix of his sculptural thought.
From an early age, Kim grew up amid the industrialized cityscape, internalizing the rhythms of steel structures, the surfaces and sheen of metal, as part of his visual experience. Such a background likely led him toward an artistic practice grounded not in the materials of nature but in the visual rhythm and order inherent in industrial substances. Stainless steel and aluminum, therefore, are not merely materials; they constitute a sculptural vocabulary that articulates his sensory system and conceptual thinking. Within his artistic universe, verticality and horizontality serve as fundamental structural principles. As seen in series such as Cross Section of Garden, Horizontal Garden, and Vertical Garden, Kim replaces the organic imagery of nature with geometric axes and repeated modules, presenting the garden as an artificial order organized by human hands.
Horizontality evokes the expansion and repetition of the horizon, while verticality reveals the tension and ascent of the pillar. The two axes form equilibrium through their mutual contrast, encapsulating the duality of the garden—between nature and the artificial, openness and delineation. Kim’s garden, as he once described, is “a landscape designed by human desire” (interview); it is not a representation of nature but a structural metaphor that emerges at the boundary between the natural and the artificial. For instance, Horizontal Garden (Brass, 160 × 680 × 160(h) cm, 2018) exemplifies this formal reasoning. Repetitively arranged metallic lines and modules are perceived differently according to the angles of light and shadow, producing variations of structure that shift with the viewer’s position. The Vertical Gardens series (36 Vertical Gardens – B24C12, 48 Vertical Gardens – B36C12, 54 Vertical Gardens – B42C12, 2024) presented in this exhibition also adopts a configuration in which rounded forms hang rhythmically from vertical columns. The structures of verticality, horizontality, and circularity are repeated, while the numerical supports are determined by the characteristics of each work. This corresponds to Gilles Deleuze’s concept in Difference and Repetition—that “repetition is the condition of difference, and difference is inscribed within repetition.” Kim’s linear and geometric constructions are not accumulations of sameness but sensorial fields of becoming, in which difference is generated through repetition. The Meaning of Sculpture within Systems of Structure and Repetition
Byoungho KIM’s sculptures consistently present cool, sleek metallic surfaces. Industrial materials such as stainless steel and aluminum reveal a systematic and impersonal sensibility—an intentional choice rather than a purely material one. Kim conceives of sculpture as a system. Much like the systems through which society operates, sculpture for him is an abstraction that condenses the principles and formal units constituting an overall structure. Accordingly, his works are realized through close collaboration with engineers, based on meticulously designed blueprints—a method that parallels the logic of industrial systems and modes of production. For this reason, his objects are reborn as aesthetic entities through the intersection of material and structure within the very processes of fabrication.
Almost all of his abstract sculptures produced in this way exhibit neutral or geometric characteristics. A single unit is repeated to form homogeneous symmetry, reflecting his reliance on geometric modules as the foundation of his sculptural language. Identical or similar units are arranged according to a design plan, producing repetitive patterns and structural outcomes. This process simultaneously evokes the order of Minimalism and raises questions about his reference to the industrial mode of production. Kim’s geometric forms, however, are not mathematical schemata; rather, they are mechanical manifestations—a function of time and material that operates according to the principles of productivity unique to the artist himself.
Kim does not carve or shape materials in the manner of a traditional sculptor. Instead, he draws design blueprints and collaborates with engineers, incorporating the production of sculpture into an industrial system. In one interview, he explained this approach, noting that “a design drawing is a language through which I can communicate with engineers.” This reveals his intention to move beyond the conventional notion of art as an act of “creation,” redefining sculpture as a process—a system in itself. For Kim, the system is a meaningful order within the productive relations of his work. He understands these relations as a condensed reflection of those found throughout society. Thus, although he produces abstract sculptures, his practice is, in essence, profoundly realist—summarizing the very structures and conditions of the real world through abstraction.
Kim’s works are exhibited within the institutional framework of art, yet their production process and sculptural language adhere strictly to the principles of the industrial system. His sculptures begin from design drawings and are completed through the processes of cutting, polishing, and assembly. This structural approach recalls what art historian Rosalind Krauss described as “materially reductive and systemic sculpture.” For instance, 130 Teardrops (2022, brass) investigates how emotion can be transformed into structure within the logic of industrial order. In the overall triangular composition, 130 tear-shaped elements trace a metallic trajectory that evokes the path of tears. The form is not an externalization of emotion but a system of precise proportion and construction. Here, the “tear” serves as a metaphor for human affect, yet when translated into a metallic structure, emotion is reproduced within mechanical order. In this sense, Kim’s sculpture does not represent the absence of emotion but rather its reconstitution—emotion generated anew through the system itself.
In Kim’s sculptural system, the most essential formal principle is repetition. Gilles Deleuze defined repetition as “a vibration that draws the sensible into a series of differences, directly shaking perception.” In his work, this vibration does not occur on the surface of matter, but within the modulations of light and shadow, space and time. When the metallic modules of Teardrops generate sensory tremors through the mediation of LED and sound, his sculpture becomes a mechanical organism that reanimates perception within the logic of industrial structure. If one were to define this as Kim’s structural machine aesthetics, it could be examined in dialogue with the tradition of early twentieth-century Russian Constructivism.
Kim’s methodology—based on metal, design blueprints, modularity, and industrial production systems—shares a conceptual affinity with Constructivism in its structural thinking and spatial orientation. Yet, whereas Constructivism pursued functionality and social production, Kim transforms the same mechanical language into a nonfunctional, abstract sculptural experiment. Artists such as Vladimir Tatlin, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and El Lissitzky sought to extend art into a social function through mechanical structures and industrial materials. They redefined art as Productivism, closely aligning it with architecture, design, and industry. Kim’s engagement with industrial systems may recall the Constructivists’ fusion of machine and art, but his direction is fundamentally different. While Tatlin and Lissitzky regarded the machine as a symbol of social productivity and progress, Kim reinterprets mechanical order as a medium for sensory generation and aesthetic contemplation. In other words, he employs the industrial system not as a language of function but as a language of perception. His work Two Collisions (2024, stainless steel, vacuum plating, patination, DC motor) most fully embodies this concept. Symmetrical metal structures move subtly by motor, and as light shifts and spatial conditions change, balance and imbalance recur. Through the perfection of symmetry, he symbolizes order, yet simultaneously reveals how that order is always destabilized by minute differences. Here, symmetry is not a static equilibrium but a dynamic symmetry—a generative order that sustains the tension of perception.
Affect, Mechanical Order, and Ultramarine Tears
Kim’s sculptural journey—rooted in the tension between metal and light, structure and order, emotion and artifice—continues to traverse multiple discursive terrains. His sculptures are not mere objects but structural devices that embody the modern systems of design, fabrication, division of labor, and assembly. This exhibition consolidates his ongoing exploration of structural systems while introducing a new series, Symmetric Garden (2025), in which color becomes the accent of tension.
The Symmetric Garden series, whose vivid ultramarine hue seizes the viewer’s gaze, extends from his earlier works he refers to as “tears.” The artist creates rhythmic sequences through circular droplets and their supporting frames, generating visual modules of transparent structure and transparent system. This work, too, is imprinted with the repetitive patterns of a systemic society. At the moment when the emotional signifier of “tears” is reconstructed as an industrial module, the work becomes a point of intersection between sensibility and industry, nature and machine—culminating in ultramarine tears. This embodies a new stratum of abstraction in which human affect and mechanical order operate simultaneously.
In this sense, Byoungho KIM’s sculpture is not merely a visual transformation of industrial aesthetics but a field of sensory experimentation that reconsiders the relationship between art and technology. Can forms generated by machines evoke sensation or emotion? His metal sculptures do not signify the absence of feeling but the refinement of it, producing subtle vibrations of sensibility within impassive structures. The meticulous equilibrium of Symmetric Garden, the structural emotion of Tears, and the rhythmic repetition of Horizontal Garden all converge toward the same aesthetic principle of sensory ordering.
Borrowing the language of technology and systems, Kim rewrites the ontology of sensation. His cold metallic structures are not industrial objects per se but phenomenological fields in which perception is generated within mechanical order. Like Rimbaud’s “pillars of ultramarine,” Kim’s sculptures reveal a depth of sensation that emerges where the human hand withdraws. His metallic symmetries and repetitions conceal beneath their cool surfaces the ultramarine of emotion. Symmetric Garden—a condensation of Kim’s sculptural world—is a mechanical landscape that generates sensory variations through industrial structures and mechanical order. The ultramarine tears recall symbols of emotion and sanctity, yet when reconstituted as metallic modules within a machine system, they invite us into a new kind of garden—a landscape where nature and artifice, machine and sensation, intersect.
September 30, 2025
Namhee PARK (Art Critic, Director of Nam June Paik Art Center)