About
Founder of KHJ Studio, Kim HyunJoo is an artist and a designer focused on sculpture, installation, and craft-related lifestyle items.
Her design philosophy has always been to combine quality material with a craft-driven approach, to eliminate false barriers between design and craft, and to make things that function as art. Her love and obsession is nature and natural materials, and works mainly stone, and Hanji – Korean traditional paper. She aims through her work to deliver the ambient beauty of nature and craftsmanship.
Artist note:
Over the years I have been constantly interested in the potential of raw, natural materials and the organic beauty they can generate. Largely because of this my work contains the texture and form of nature. I work principally with two materials: stone, which contains the integrity and pattern of geological time, and Hanji (Korean traditional paper), which is made of densely stacked mulberry fibers.
I enjoy the contrariness of nature: the use of two materials which are essentially opposed in their make-up – hard stone that needs to be cut to form a shape, and a flexible paper that can be stacked or layered to form a three-dimensional structure – come from, I believe, my own tendency to juxtapose different physical qualities.
I enjoy the simultaneity of opposites: contemporary and traditional materials; two and three-dimensions; objects for private and public spheres; handmade and digital design; rural and city life; organic and geometric form. However, my aesthetic approach and production methods are reconciled through one concept: nature.
