Chang Kon Lim (b. 1994) begins his work with an imaginative exploration of the invisible interior of the human body. While our bodies are tangible and intrinsically connected to the self, their inner world remains an unknowable realm—almost like a foreign land.
 
The artist delves into the body as a site of condensed mystery, tracing the sensations that arise within it. In doing so, he blends the physical characteristics and forms he discovers with elements of real-world landscapes, blurring the boundary between reality and the unreal, and evoking something that feels vividly alive and in motion.

In his early work, Chang Kon Lim’s interest in the body was directed not inward, but rather toward a critical view of how the body is shaped by external perspectives. For instance, his 2019 solo exhibition 《Bulging Scenery》 at Artspace Hyeong featured a series of intense works that seemed to confront the objectification and othering of queer male bodies.
 
Red, fragmented, and reassembled male bodies sprawled across walls and floors, boldly engaging in acts that expose sexual behaviors and emotions deviating from the so-called “normal” categories of sexuality. These figures lift their hips to reveal their genitals and anuses or crouch down, paradoxically displaying emotions that hover between shame and timidity in the most unreserved, provocative manner.

This series of works translates the oppression experienced as a queer man who has been othered into a personal and intimate painterly expression. The artist critiques a phallocentric society that renders descriptors such as “emotional,” “passive,” and “receptive” inherently negative.
 
Chang Kon Lim sees this aspect of humanity are immediately framed as “Homo.” Through the medium of painting, he sought not only to free himself from the oppression produced by this structure, but also, more importantly, to open up the possibility of momentary relief for other queer individuals who share similar burdens.

According to his artist’s note, this series of works resists the “Homo Frame,” a trap that generalizes and confines queer men as “weak beings.” Lim considers the multiple panels or canvas frames that serve as the support for his paintings as a kind of social “trap” that confines the queer body. He begins his process by rearranging and recombining these traps, imagining the form of a male body that might be caught within the overall shape of the assembled frame in a certain posture.

His work inverts the conventional process by which images are realized in the medium of painting. Only after arranging and assembling the frames to fit a given space or environment does the image come into being—an image that metaphorically reveals the queer male body overlaid with social stereotypes.
 
The red bodies spread throughout the exhibition space collectively form a kind of landscape. This landscape captures the struggle of queer individuals striving to live authentically, outside the norms of heteronormative, male-dominated standards. Even within the frames that confine them, their bodies move in order to survive—and in that struggle, they turn red.

In this way, Chang Kon Lim explores the concerns and conflicts of living as a minority through formal experimentation in painting. By deconstructing, displacing, and recombining bodies that fall outside society’s standards of “normalcy,” the artist confronts and resists the realities he faces through painterly gestures.
 
The wooden panels that serve as the primary support and material in his paintings become both the foundation of the work and a metaphor for the body. Through the process of painting, physically cutting, and breaking the wood, the artist describes feeling as though he is “in conversation with the material.” He engages with the wood through a tactile experience, fully sensing the weight and pressure applied by his own hands.

In his 2022 solo exhibition 《48!: Morphing Gesture》 at Space Cadalogs, Chang Kon Lim experimented with new ways of activating his work. While his earlier series ‘A Vacant Man’ (2018–2019) gave the impression of a body leaping inward into the white walls where the panels were hung, the ‘Morphing Gesture’ (2022) works in this exhibition, he says, felt as though the body were springing outward from the panels.

The ‘Morphing Gesture’ series implies a state that is not fixed but constantly subject to change. Throughout the roughly three-week exhibition period, the artist visited the gallery daily to rearrange the works. Engaging with the materials as if in dialogue, he focused on the body in that particular moment—seeking, revealing, and blending forms anew each day.
 
Compared to his previous works, the individual pieces in this series had grown in size, eventually surpassing bodily scale and filling the walls completely. His "body" began to expand. The sensation he previously described—of the body springing outward from the panels—can be understood as a shift in perception, as his work expanded to include not only space but also movement within it as essential components.

Meanwhile, the ‘Crystals’ series—composed of leftover fragments produced from cutting out forms from the panels—becomes an independent work depending on how these pieces are assembled. In other words, these works function as a kind of modular sculpture, always holding the potential to transform into new forms of existence.

If the ‘Morphing Gesture’ and ‘Crystals’ series focus on the form of the body, the works A Pool of Water (2022) and A Path of Air (2022)—painted solely through brushstrokes with a painterly approach—reveal the interior space of the body as a place.
 
This series of paintings consists of the artist’s imaginative landscapes of the body’s interior, which, though invisible, can be sensed. Within them reside forms that blend everything the artist has experienced and imagined: muscles, body parts like hands and fingers, elongated intestines, shapes of plants and animals, and even inanimate objects such as stones.

In his artist’s note, Chang Kon Lim explains that “the movements involved in touching, breaking, mixing, and combining materials made him feel as if he was in conversation with the entity itself, while also heightening his awareness of his own body and the space he occupies.” This sensory experience led him to perceive the interior of the body as if it were a vast cave.
 
Imagining the passageways within this body, the artist senses an unseen internal space. The bodily channel, beginning at the mouth and extending to the anus, connects ultimately to the outside world, yet its interior remains slick and smooth. Chang Kon Lim likened this interior to painting oil—sticky and flowing, yet eventually shrinking and settling into a distinct form.

Chang Kon Lim explores the slick inner space of the body, seeking out both the “wrinkles within the body” where countless movements occur, and the “wrinkles of paint” that flow, pool, and eventually shrink. In tracing these bodily sensations, the artist continually envisions writhing, living things such as “sticky blood and fluids, stalactites in caves, magma erupting from volcanoes, twisted internal organs, and the roots of ancient trees.”
 
These images that arise in his mind blend with the paint to create the tactile quality of the wrinkles. Though difficult to precisely describe, these grotesque yet beautiful, repulsive yet alluring wrinkles embody an ambivalent nature, evoking a state poised to transform into something else.

In other words, Chang Kon Lim’s work is about exploring the dark passages inside the body and bringing the small worlds he discovers there out into the world we live in. The previously unknowable sensations within the body become tangible physical entities through features such as the protruding paint surface resembling shrunken blood vessels, the impression of colors emitting a yellowish glow, roughly carved outer shapes, and the palpable thickness of the support structure—creating a solid, voluminous presence.

Furthermore, the artist imagines these living wrinkles expanding more widely and becoming spaces in their own right. He constantly engages in a dialogue with his own body and the outside world, sensing and tactilely manifesting the living movements within the body as spatial forms. Chang Kon Lim’s work is thus a journey to discover the sensory realities of the body that cannot be seen, inviting not only the artist himself but also the viewer to continuously perceive and imagine the ever-changing, moving body.

 ”I cannot put a name on it, but I keep thinking about something that keeps wriggling and moving, that is disgusting and beautiful at once, and that is full of life forms that are simultaneously grotesque and charming and that feel intent on changing instantly into some other things. It is by sensing these things inwardly that I somehow become convinced that I, too, am continuously changing.”    (Chang Kon Lim, Seoul Museum of Art 〈2024 Nanji Access: Premiere〉)

Chang Kon Lim received his BFA in Painting from Seoul National University and is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Painting at the same university’s graduate school. His major solo exhibitions include 《48!: Morphing Gesture》 (Space Cadalogs, Seoul, 2022) and 《Bulging Scenery》 (Artspace Hyeong, Seoul, 2019).
 
Lim has also participated in various group exhibitions, including 《Crush Zone》 (Gallery SP, Seoul, 2025), 《Talking Heads》 (Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2025), 《Exoskeleton》 (P21, Seoul, 2024), 《DOOSAN Art Lab 2023》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2023), 《21st Century Paintings》 (HITE Collection, Seoul, 2021), 《Gaze》 (Space 413, Seoul, 2020), 《Station!》 (Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul, 2019), and more.
 
Chang Kon Lim was selected for the ‘DOOSAN Art Lab’ at DOOSAN Art Center in 2022 and an artist-in-residence at the SeMA Nanji Residency in 2024.

References

• 임창곤, Chang Kon Lim (Artist Website)
• 서울시립미술관, Seoul Museum of Art | 17. 임창곤 〈2024 난지액세스: 프리미어〉
• P21, 임창곤 (P21, Chang Kon Lim)
• 임창곤, [작가 노트] 덫과 신체 그리고 불거지는 풍경, 2019 (Chang Kon Lim, [Artist’s Note] Traps, Bodies, and Bulging Scenery, 2019)
• 공간형, [서문] 불거지는 풍경 (Artspace, [Preface] Bulging Scenery)
• 스페이스 카다로그, [서문] ‘온몸으로 사랑을 외치는 황색 그림’에 대하여 – 신지현 (Space Cadalogs, [Preface] About ‘Golden Paintings, Bodily Shouting out Love’ - Jihyun Shin)
• 임창곤, [작가 노트] 몸의 길을 내는 몸부림, 2023 (Chang Kon Lim, [Artist’s Note] The Struggle to Carve a Path for the Body, 2023)