Yong Joo Kim

A native of Seoul, Korea, Yong Joo is a Niche award and SAC Award winning artist who explores how beauty emerges by investigating both conscious and sub-conscious modes of making. She is interested in the comparison between this process and the evolutionary process found in nature, with a special focus on the role of human trust of material potential in this context.

As a traditionally trained metalsmith, Yong Joo let go of her usual repertoire of precious metals during her graduate studie at the Rhode Island School of Design, to explore the world of unnoticed objects. Through this processes, she witnessed―over and over again―that no matter how mundane or insignificant a material seemed, as long as the process of exploration began with a firm belief in their potential, and the creative process was one that was imbued with the desire to empathize, she was eventually surprised to discover that the material possessed qualities that I did not know existed.

As both an independent artist and co-founder of Sublime Experiment, she continues her search into the concept of inner-beauty and the process of exploration responsible for uncovering it from unlikely sources.