Parallax: Minah Kim’s Exhibition at The Clay Studio

by Julia Yun   

In summer 2025, I was thrilled to be selected as the IDEAL Intern at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, PA. In addition to working with Jennifer Zwilling and Trinity Dubois on preparations for the organization’s projects around the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I closely studied ceramicist Minah Kim’s process and artistry as the capstone project for my internship. I filmed an Object Share video for Decorative Arts Trust members, which will be available soon. Below are excerpts from my essay about Minah Kim’s recent solo exhibition at The Clay Studio, Parallax.

During Minah Kim’s three year-long residency at The Clay Studio, she dedicated herself to nourishing her ceramic practice and her artistic interests regarding the human condition. She approached this by investigating and questioning the emotional undercurrents of our experiences as living, social creatures seeing and being seen by others. During the residency, Kim took research trips to Warsaw, Poland, and Gwangju, South Korea, where she spoke with survivors of political conflicts and cultivated a deeper, emotional understanding of what remains at stake, within the periphery of, below and above the surface in moments of loss, turmoil, and conflict. Parallax is the culmination of this pursuit.

Parallax is defined as the “effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions.” The effect is reimagined in Kim’s exhibition with ceramic sculptures positioned on either side of the titular piece, a white 3D-printed screen, where the viewer must look through the holes of a literal obstructive force that prohibits a clear view of the other side. As the viewer, we are the outsider perceiving the sculptures experiencing their isolated acts of grief and loss on the opposite side of the screen, figures that represent the other that we can not fully know.

The Parallax screen (figure 3) is composed of consecutively 3D-printed plastic tiles, and each tile is of a generally radial shape and made up of identical irregular patterns. Lines and shapes are moving, curving, and melting into each other at different angles. The sections were 3D-scanned from a model that Kim created with the ceramic petals that cover other sculptures in the show.

The ceramic sculpture of a child titled I (figure 4) stares intently at Parallax. The child stands stoically atop a black platform with glossy, acrylic patterns on the surface drawn from the positive space of the structural patterns of the Parallax screen. I is painted in solid black with colors of vibrant reds and oranges blooming across its torso and face and ceramic petal-like pieces all across its body. Kim creates the ceramic petal-like pieces by pinching the clay between her thumb and fingers, allowing the material to retain the thumbprints that are left behind. They attract our attention and dictate the direction in which our gaze is supposed to move, controlling the amount of time spent observing a certain section of an object, or the entire piece.¹ Kim notes that the act of covering the figures in these ceramic petals felt as though she was in direct conversation with the figures, as if she was touching the other in this intimate and private act of sculpting, making, and feeling.

Kim placed the three ceramic sculptures behind the screen: I am gone / you are not alone, My first death, and Writer. The viewer must walk around a second wall to fully observe the figures that had been obscured by the Parallax partition initially. From across the screen, the figures appear strictly ambiguous and unknowable–confined in a space, obscured by a partition, and unreachable by the distance. As Kim directs the viewer to access the other side of the screen, we enter a reimagined space that permits a more intimate and vulnerable involvement with the other.

You are gone / I am not alone (figure 5) depicts a grieving parent from the torso up, holding a bundle of fabric covered in Kim’s ceramic petals. Without facial expressions and other affirmations that might provide more clarity on what the parent figure is feeling, gestures illustrate the ways in which they are grieving.

In observing My first death (figure 6), we witness a different physical expression of grief. A parent figure on their knees is leaning over a long, wooden, rectangular box that has been charred. Their torso is completely horizontal, resting one side of their face and their folded arms atop of the surface of the box, kneeling up from the floor. Ceramic petal-like pieces are scattered all across the top of the parent’s head, back, and legs. By using a black, plain, wooden box to reference coffins and death, Kim provides the space to instinctively react and interpret the piece from the viewer’s perspective.

Writer (figure 7) is painted entirely in shades of pink, green, and white as ceramic petal-like pieces lie atop of its head and gather around its hands and feet, suggesting a sense of youth and new life, like that of a budding flower. The ceramic sculpture sits upon a black platform with glossy, reflective acrylic pieces reproduced from the negative space of the Parallax patterns of the screen. The figure appears solemn and weary as they sit atop a concrete-like slab. With their head down, Writer gazes at their reflection amongst the pieces of glossy acrylic on the surface on the platform, suggesting an act of private contemplation. The ceramic petals illustrate a sense of play, dialogue, and introspection, as they are abundant around their arms and legs.

Parallax is simultaneously an instinctual response to the events before us, but there is also room to act upon our empathy, the inability to inhabit the other, and the radical differences in our lived experiences as human beings in separate bodies. You are gone / I am not alone, My first death, Writer, and I, are images and representations of grief, loss, conflict, and sorrow that can be understood emotionally and perceptually regardless of who, when, and where. They are vessels for  the  stories of people found across time, encapsulating the dualities of the human experience: hope and despair, and life and death. Parallax is more than just the effects produced by the different perspectives taken, but a dialogue between us and the other, an attempt to see and understand each other all as actors of the human condition.

Julia Yun was the IDEAL Intern at The Clay Studio in summer 2025. She recently graduated from Drexel University. 

1. From an interview with Minah Kim, “The role of petals in my work is for visual friction, so that it’s actually about the gaze–how to see our parallaxes. It’s [a] very important thing to make people think [on] how to see things. And it [the petals] started from a different path in the past, but now I’m actively using it as a visual friction that kind of holds on, creates, maybe controls how people stare at my work–even the speed at which people react to my work.”