Ham Jin

Love, Three. Courtesy of PMK Gallery

Biggest, tallest, strongest, fastest, in a world of competing enormities, Seoul-based Korean artist Ham Jin makes the tiny a spectacle and spectacles a scream.

“I want to make a spectacle that is invisible to the eye—which is a part of everyday life,” says the 30-year-old artist, who, since the age of twenty, has made a living and a name for himself with miniscule clay sculptures defying humor and horror.

Portrait by Jiyang Kim

Sure enough, both tiny and spectacle make a scene for mass appeal. Pitting paradoxes of the small and cute against the ugly and grotesque, Ham’s work is as much about the process of looking as they are a startling visualization of otherworldliness. In the mixed-media installation “Airplane,” a plummeting paper airplane is enshrouded by what appears to be a gossamer cloud of tiny moths. With the aid of binoculars or a magnifying glass (your pick), the “moths” reveal to be an army of tiny human-like creatures, each featuring an expression of grotesque alarm with muted screams or tightly-shut eyes as they brace for the dive. In another installation, a long, skinny plastic case with miniature clay sculptures is placed inside the bottom of the wall. Ham again enlists the archeologist and detective in his spectators, forcing viewers to kneel down with a flashlight to survey “Underneath It.”

Aewan

When asked about the inspiration for his work, Ham calls on both childhood and his formative years at the Kyungwon University for the Arts. A harvest of images and sensory details from growing up in Icheon, a rural area in Korea, where he spent days walking around in the mountains, drawing mushrooms and little bugs imbues his work with a childlike quality. “In the arts, I am placed awkwardly in between the professional artists and the kindergarteners,” the artist says. Using a cut and paste method with clay material, he rebelled against the rigid, emulation methods taught at Art School and relied on journaling and self-evaluations of his life, love, country, and birth to arrive at the creation of his unique world.

Nowadays Ham seems never short of inspiration, finding narratives among mundane household objects. His latest projects include the hidden city of a dirty computer keyboard wrangled with dust (snow) and hair (houses on top of keys), and the accumulation of naturally placed objects on a desk that forms urban sprawl. “Ideas come to me really fast,” Ham smiles, and after seeing his work, we’re all listening a little harder at the voices in, out, between, or beneath our enormous lives.