THE SEA THAT WE WANT TO SEE
Korea Foundation Gallery • Seoul / South Korea • 2025
About the work of Katherina Heil featured in the exhibition “The Sea We Want to See” at KF Gallery
Heeseung Choi, Curator, based in Seoul.
In Katherina Heil’s work, philosophical ideas that are not always straightforward or easily understood become intuitive or clear in visual works. Katherina expresses the theme of the cosmos richly through a variety of materials, including sculpture, video, installation, drawing, and sound, and each time you explore her work in different ways, you get a little closer to the story she‘s trying to tell.
In Katherina’s work, the human, using her own body, and the mechanical, intellectual parts of her practice are often simultaneously present: the video of Almost (2019), slickly made with 3D graphics, is narrated by the artist‘s voice, while Orbiter (2021), in which photographic data of planetary surfaces are applied to the surface of a sculpture, is overlaid with drawings drew by hand with countless lines. It’s interesting to me that she balances these different approaches.
The meteorite sculpture in particular, which is a life cast of the artist‘s own hand, is symbolic of this meeting of intuition and reflection. Having come to know the artist as a sincere and caring person, I feel a little bit like I’m meeting the artist when I see her works that contains a part of her.
THE SEA WE WANT TO SEE
Afra Eisma, Jiajia Qi, Katherina Heil, Sam Hersbach
Curated by Heeseung Choi, curatorial assistant: Soyeon Song
‘The Sea We Want to See’ is an exhibition that is a component of an exchange project between Billytown Artist-Run Initiative in The Hague and Korea Foundation Gallery in Seoul. It is curated by Heeseung Choi and highlights The Hague based artists in Seoul.
The exhibiton showcases the works of four international artists Sam Hersbach, Afra Eisma, Jiajia Qi, and Katherina Heil. Through diverse mediums including paintings, textiles, installations, sculptures, and drawings, the exhibition explores themes such as the environment and women, the virtual and the real, the cosmos and the human, and perception and experience.
‘Raising a sea spray’ is the main theme of the exhibition. The sea spray is softer than the waves and winds of the sea, and we can see it without wariness or hostility. It seems to appear and disappear as quickly as it came, but it is constantly happening, an invisible and powerful force of nature that makes us remember the ground we stand on.
The title of the exhibition is also the meaning of possibilities to see how the artists from the Netherlands, where water and the sea are so familiar in everyday life that it has been called ‘the lowest sea horizontal line’, and South Korea, where most of the land is surrounded by the sea, will experience each other’s landscapes of water.
Visitors will be able to embrace the concept of the exhibition as a fluid phenomenon, rather than a fixed form or theory, and will be able to create different shapes of sea spray in their own minds.
Supported by Korea Foundation, Billytown, Mondriaan Fonds, Dutch Embassy Korea