Hounyeh Kim

Growing up between South Korea and the United States, Hounyeh Kim became interested not only in cultural difference, but in why people exposed to similar social structures could still perceive, behave, and respond to the world in markedly different ways. This led to a question that has remained central to her practice: how is a self formed through the particular ways a body encounters, responds to, and is changed by its surroundings?

She first studied French literature, where this curiosity developed into a sustained interest in phenomenology, especially the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. After moving into visual art, her research expanded toward enactivism and process philosophy. Rather than treating perception as something produced by a stable subject, she became increasingly interested in how perception, action, memory, habit, and bodily adaptation participate in the continual formation of the subject itself.