2024 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow: Dahn Gim

Banner Image: Installation view of Strata: 2016-2019, 2024. Image courtesy of Dahn Gim.

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This is the fifth in a series of articles profiling the six distinguished artists chosen as 2024 McKnight Fellows in Visual Arts, a grant program for mid-career artists in Minnesota that is administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The 2024 cohort includes Rachel Breen, Sophia Chai, Dahn Gim, Alison Hiltner, R. Yun Matea, and Chris Rackley.

Their two-year fellowship will culminate this spring with a group show, What Holds and What Breaks, opening May 7, 6–8pm and running through June 7 at the Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul.

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Photo by Rik Sferra, courtesy of MCAD.

 

Gim’s work is about materiality. To me, the constructions, though striking, inventive, and aesthetically compelling, ultimately remain secondary. I believe that objects carry memory. However unconventional that belief may be, Gim’s sculptures hold deeply personal stories. Whether it’s constructing a marble-esqe pillar out of immigration papers, wrapping metal junk yard remnants in fine leather, or extrapalating text from a Korean passport, the sense you get is that these objects matter, and so much.

Dahn Gim is a multidisciplinary artist working across sound, video, textile, drawing, digital prints, sculpture, and performance. Born in Busan and raised in Toronto, Gim is now based in Los Angeles and Minneapolis. Since completing her MFA in Media Arts at UCLA, she has explored our relationship to temporality, as well as the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar. In her recent work, Gim reimagines found objects, studying their shape, form, and original function before transforming them into something unexpected, even fantastical.

Her studio practice centers on hybridity and adaptation. By breaking objects apart or concealing them, she reshapes their narratives. In her practice, she draws on her experiences as an immigrant to engage questions of identity and belonging. In her studio, I saw firsthand the materials and processes behind the work.

The Studio

With Gim, each sculpture carries physical and emotional weight. Standing in her studio, I found myself circling one piece in particular: a dense metal form wrapped in pale leather. The piece is now titled "Names I Had You Call Me." It started as a 40-pound metal object she found at a Los Angeles junkyard while working on her thesis. "I found that in a junkyard in L.A.," she tells me. "I was working on my thesis, just looking for materials."

 

Top image: Names I Had You Call Me: Ashley in Dahn Gim's studio. Image courtesy of Laura Laptsevitch. Bottom Image: Detail of Names I Had You Call Me: Ashley, courtesy of Dahn Gim.

 

Gim carried it from apartment to apartment for four or five years without knowing what to do with it. At some point, she started experimenting. "I added sound to it first," she says. "It felt like a container. Like a body." After living with something long enough, how you see it starts to change. One day in the studio, she dropped fabric over it while using it as a coat hanger. 

"I started seeing these lines," she says, gesturing along the surface. Eventually, she added leather to the object, which exaggerated every dip and ridge. Gim's sculptures don't read as bodies at first. They register as objects; industrial, heavy, maybe even a little awkward. But if you sit with them long enough, you see what I saw in Gim’s studio. "It almost looks like it's breathing," I say, half to myself. She nods. "I started treating them like bodies. Or organs."

Names I Had You Call Me

What began as a playful experiment evolved into a four piece series. The title Names I Had You Call Me references a story from Gim’s childhood, when she immigrated to Canada from South Korea at age ten. "Nobody could pronounce my name," she tells me. Her English teacher gave her a name she felt no connection to. This prompted the search through baby books for a name with some meaning.

Over the years and across different cities, Gim cycled through multiple names, so that now, when she meets people from different periods of her life, each one calls her something different. "When I look back at my yearbooks," she says, "I'm called different things at different points." Each sculpture in the series carries one of those names. Ashley, Erin, Jessica, and Catherine.

The sculptures mark a different version of herself, tied to a specific place and time. The sculptures inherit that sensibility, and naming them makes them feel even more precious. Gim speaks about her attachment to them with striking tenderness. Selling a piece prompted genuine anxiety about where the work was going and whether it would be okay. "Last year I sold Erin. It was an exciting moment, but at the same time, I thought, where's Erin going? Is she going to be okay?"

Gim connects the work to a broader truth about immigrants and objects: when you move frequently, and especially across borders, your things become your continuity. Photo albums disappear in transit. A piece of clothing vanishes between apartments. The permanence of objects becomes its own kind of loss. Maybe this is why found objects have become so central to Gim's work.

 

Installation View of Names I Had You Call Me at Steve Turner Gallery. Images courtesy of Dahn Gim.

 

New Work

On a nearby table, a different set of materials: thin planks of vinyl flooring scattered like patchwork. "These are free samples," she says, picking one up. "You can just take them." They're lighter than expected, slightly too smooth, their texture printed rather than grown. "These materials are trying to be something," she continues. "But they're not."

That gap between appearance and reality, between what something is and what it performs, runs through all of her work. A recurring thread in her studio practice is what she calls "material dishonesty": materials that imitate something else. For instance, the vinyl flooring mimics a real wood grain. 

She connects the experience directly to growing up as a renter, surrounded by furniture from different decades and price points that were never meant to go together, a “certain immigrant aesthetic” she now recognizes as formative.

 

Top image: work table at Gim's studio with vinyl flooring and a deconstructed Strata. Bottom Image: Installation view of camouflage fabric in Gim's studio. Images courtesy of Laura Laptsevitch.

 

The hunting camouflage fabrics she's currently exploring carry the same contradiction: designed to make you invisible, yet simultaneously creating hyper-visibility. "You're supposed to disappear," she says. "But you also want to be seen."

In her work, these materials are stripped of their function and recontextualized. A perfect example is the work Gim show’s me next: Strata. 

Strata

Strata immediately stands out as Gim’s most resolved body of work. I saw the deconstructed version on the very table that held the vinyl flooring. Between 2016 and 2019, the Gim accumulated immigration documents, visa applications, green card filings, chapter dividers, and correspondence, using them as raw material, layering and rolling them around a lathe, then chiseling away to reveal the work beneath. "It becomes like a block," she says. "And then you start removing."

The act of carving reveals what has been hidden. Text appears and disappears. "It's about deciding when to stop," she says. "You might really like a texture, but then you're curious about what's underneath." At first glance, the works read as solid. But they're made entirely of paper.

 

Top Image: Installation view of Strata: 2016-2019, 2024. Bottom Image: detail of Strata: 2016-2019. Images courtesy of Dahn Gim.

 

The result looks and feels like marble, which was intentional: Gim wanted to reference the prestige of marble architecture while using the most bureaucratic, unglamorous material imaginable. That tension between preservation and exposure mirrors the experience of navigating bureaucratic systems. Identity is constructed through documentation, but it is also fragmented, conditional, and constantly under review.

The timeline of these works is not incidental. The series spanned Trump's first presidential year through her decision to leave the U.S. ahead of COVID-19. "That was when I was renewing my visa," she says. "Things were changing. It felt risky to stay." So she left. Returned to South Korea. Planned to come back. Then COVID hit. "I couldn't come back," she says simply. "It ended up being the right decision. I got to spend time with my dad." He passed away a few years later.

We move back through the studio. Past the leather forms, past the flooring samples, past a series of layered prints that incorporate passport photos and fragments of text. "I have pieces that just sit for years," she says. "I'm not ready to do anything with them yet." I ask what keeps her coming back. She paused. "I just like being here. Sometimes I'll sit and look at something for hours." Over time, that gradual, sustained practice translated into real outcomes in her career. Gim received the McKnight Fellowship on her first application, after only three years of Minnesota eligibility. She got the call while driving on 35W. She credits her success to having a documented body of work. "Just keep making," she tells her students. "Don't wait."

 

Gim showing off some in-progress work in her studio, image courtesy of Laura Laptsevitch.

 

Gim understands, perhaps better than most, that identity itself is a kind of material dishonesty, something performed, layered, and chiseled away at until what remains feels true. She has spent years sitting with objects that had no clear purpose yet, trusting that meaning would show itself. It is a patience born not from comfort but from necessity, the same necessity that sent her moving from city to city, name to name, country to country. In that sense, her studio is not just a workspace; it is the most honest record of a life in motion.

Dahn Gim has built a body of work from the things most people discard or overlook. In doing so, it has made the invisible visible. The names she was given and the name she was born with, the documents that determined where she could live and for how long, were not wasted. It reminds us that art does not happen apart from life. Gim received the McKnight Fellowship on her first application, a recognition that feels less like luck and more like the inevitable result of sustained, uncompromising devotion to her practice. Her advice to students is simple: just keep making. And if her own work is any evidence, what you make will find its meaning; you only have to be willing to sit with it long enough.◼︎

To see more of Dahn Gim's work, visit her website dahngim.com. View Gim's most recent work at What Holds and What Breaks, opening May 7, 6–8pm and running through June 7 at the Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul.