Object 371, 2025,
Acrylic on canvas, 91 × 91cm.

Image courtesy of the artist and Hive Center for Contemporary Art.

Object 372, 2025,
Acrylic on canvas, 112 × 162cm.

Image courtesy of the artist and Hive Center for Contemporary Art.

Object 377, 2025,
Acrylic on canvas, 162 × 130cm.

Image courtesy of the artist and Hive Center for Contemporary Art.

Object 381, 2025,
Acrylic on canvas, 72 × 72cm.

Image courtesy of the artist and Hive Center for Contemporary Art.

Object 378, 2025,
Acrylic on canvas, 130 × 90cm.

Image courtesy of the artist and Hive Center for Contemporary Art.

memory/

When I was little, my family strongly opposed my pursuing art, so I never considered painting until high school. They would always tell me how hard life is for an artist. Then, during my first year of high school, I joined a one-month sketching trip to the countryside organized by my school. That was when I realized how much I loved painting—nothing could stop me.

My grandfather was a Korean painter. He taught me brush calligraphy, and he took me to his artist friends’ studios. I spent whole days there, playing around in that neighborhood—it was a bit like the atmosphere of Beijing’s 798 Art District. He studied in Japan in his early years; before that, he worked as a landscape designer, and only after returning home did he become a full-time painter. Since my parents worked abroad for long stretches of my childhood, my grandfather’s house was essentially my home. He loved collecting, and the house was filled with Japanese and Chinese antiques. He even had a ceramics studio at home. From a young age, he loved telling me stories about ceramics and his collections. I felt that every small object in his house carried countless fascinating stories. He would tell them bit by bit, and I was always deeply intrigued.

I realized the stories behind these objects didn’t always have to be logical. That very lack of logic made me realize, as a child, that not everything in life needs to be well-reasoned or make sense. The logic could simply be that the object, or its owner, gives it definition. For me, believing in its existence was enough.

The artist’s studio.

Courtesy of the artist.

line/

I began formally studying art in my first year of high school, learning sketching and color in prep classes and painting like a machine. At the time, it felt tedious, though now I realize it was necessary practice. Printmaking techniques influenced me greatly, and I’m very focused on sequence and craftsmanship. Compared to learning “artistic thinking,” it felt more like technical learning. That’s why order and technique remain so important in my practice now.

I began working with ceramics in my junior year of university, though honestly, my pieces weren’t very good; clay still doesn’t really obey me. It was only when I started using clay-modeling 3D software that I could truly control forms. It was quick and convenient, and I tried to model both tangible and intangible things I encountered in different situations. What I recorded carried many subtle meanings, perhaps only I knew them. They lived inside me and later became my material, serving my images.

In graduate school, I realized I had a serious misunderstanding of art. I thought you had to express some profound reasoning for it to count as art, which was exhausting. For a while, I even lost interest in pursuing art. After graduation, during a period of confusion, I tried not to think about anything I had learned in school. Instead, I just painted what I was genuinely interested in, like a child picking up a pencil for the first time, drawing only what they truly love. I began painting the jars and bottles from my collection, and the ceramics I had made in Jingdezhen. I had shipped over more than a hundred bottles I made there, and I painted them. I started turning everything I saw into a still life. After thirty or forty paintings, I noticed I began developing subjective ideas about them, gradually incorporating personal forms.

Object 379, 2025,
Acrylic on canvas, 260×130cm.

Image courtesy of the artist and Hive Center for Contemporary Art.

color/

At first, I drew still lifes with pastels, grinding away until my fingerprints almost disappeared. I felt that wasn’t sustainable, but I wanted to retain the grainy texture of pastel. That made me recall a technique my grandfather often used: mineral pigments. He would lay down a base with ground stone and then apply mineral colors. Since childhood, I had been curious about and fond of this effect. So I experimented with other materials to recreate something similar. My medium shifted from pastel to acrylic. The texture in my work comes from the mineral pigment. It doesn’t carry any special meaning; it’s just that acrylics alone felt too flat. This material gives my still lifes more presence, with traces of time embedded within them.

The objects I paint are all within arm’s reach, and the backgrounds are usually corners of my home. I pour my emotions into these objects. I don’t think only people can express the human condition—I prefer reflection and projection. My perspective isn’t limited. Whatever I paint is always, in some way, an expression of how a person perceives the world within this cultural sphere.

In the past, I relied heavily on the forms I created with software, painting them almost exactly as they appeared, so the modeling remained within a “reasonable” range. But when drafting by hand, I found the lines more free. I didn’t need to think about logic. For example, as I painted while reflecting and feeling, a spout of a bottle might suddenly appear in an “illogical” place. The three-dimensional form shifted—it wasn’t just a bottle anymore, it gained a personality. Nowadays, I use 3D software less and less, maybe because my understanding of still life has become more subjective.

Written and interviewed by Sarah Qing Markovitz.

Sarah Qing Markovitz is a writer and curator based in Beijing, China, where she serves as the Director of International Programming at Hive Center for Contemporary Art.

Published August 25, 2025.

Courtesy of the artist.

Xian Kim

Xian Kim (b. 1992) is an artist based in Seoul, South Korea. She received a BA in Printmaking from Tsinghua University’s Academy of Fine Arts in 2014 and MA in Printmaking from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2018.

Kim has presented recent solo exhibitions at Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; ARTSIDE Gallery, Seoul; GALERIEOVO, Taipei; and Gallery in HQ, Seoul. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Harper’s Chelsea, New York; Newchild, Antwerp; ARTSIDE Gallery, Seoul; Gallery in HQ, Seoul; Art Sohyang, Busan; Hive Art Center, Beijing; Gallery Luan & Co., Seoul; Gallery Park Young, Gyeonggi; and Gallery in HQ, Seoul, among others. She was recognized as a KIAF (Korea International Art Fair) Highlights Artist Semifinal Top 10 in 2024. Kim’s work is held in the public collection of MMCA Art Bank, a subsidiary of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.