Kim Woojin’s sculptures begin with a dream that was never entirely abandoned. As a child, he wanted to become a zookeeper. Years later, animals returned to his life through sculpture, becoming vessels for memory, longing, and imagination.
Working primarily with stainless steel, Kim constructs his animals from thousands of individual metal units. Welded, polished, layered, and assembled, these fragments accumulate like three-dimensional brushstrokes until a recognizable body emerges. The process is physical and repetitive, but also deeply personal. Separate elements become whole, much as fragments of memory gradually shape an identity.
The contrast between material and emotion is central to his practice. Stainless steel suggests industry, permanence, and strength, yet Kim’s animals possess an unexpected vulnerability. Their rough surfaces retain evidence of their construction, while vivid colors interrupt the coldness of the metal with energy and playfulness.
These animals are more than representations. They carry experiences that adulthood often pushes aside: unrealized ambitions, innocence, desire, and the freedom to imagine another life. Their hollow interiors add another dimension to this tension between strength and fragility, presence and absence.
Kim describes this imagined territory as Utopia. It is not a perfect or distant world, but one assembled from what has been remembered, lost, and transformed. His sculptures give physical form to something remarkably human: the persistence of dreams we believed we had left behind.
The dream that could not be lived has not disappeared. It has simply found another form.
Joan Lluís Montané
-De la Asociación Internacional de Críticos de Arte (AICA)-.
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