Twelve years on, KIM Inbai returns with sculptures his hands knew before his eyes did

There is an argument embedded in the opening room. Two wooden frames sit on easels, their interiors lined in black, each fitted with holes just large enough for two hands. To know what is inside—which is to say, to encounter what KIM Inbai made inside them—a visitor must reach in and let touch do the work that the eye cannot. The sculptures formed in those lightless boxes carry the exact texture of that act: rough, asymmetrical, shaped by pressure and uncertainty. They could not have been made any other way. This is the exhibition’s first formal proposition: that sight, for all its presumed authority over sculptural knowledge, misses most of what a form actually is.

The show takes its title from Georges Perec’s 1967 novel—a book whose protagonist gradually withdraws from the demands of being perceived, retreating into a life of pure anonymity and drift. KIM Inbai has not made a work about Perec’s man; he has used the novel as a conceptual frame for a more precise sculptural problem. What the gallery frames as “the unbridgeable gap” between the gaze that attempts to capture a subject and the subject’s actual existence is, in this show, a productive gap—one that each of the 29 new sculptures and two-dimensional works approaches from a different direction. Perec’s sleeping man has found a loophole in consciousness; KIM’s sculptures locate the loophole in perception itself.

Installation view of Broken Yellow Line sculpture by KIM Inbai at Arario Gallery Seoul third floor — Installation view, KIM Inbai: A Man Asleep, Arario Gallery Seoul, 2026. Courtesy the artist and Arario Gallery.

Across Arario Gallery Seoul’s four active levels, the exhibition moves through distinct material registers. The basement presents a large triangular pencil drawing whose dense hatching builds depth without perspective—a spatial diagram that refuses the usual mechanics of recession—alongside Touching Perspective, a tall angled sculpture that pursues the same suppression of optical distance. On the third floor, Broken Yellow Line runs road-marking segments through the gallery’s physical walls as if the virtual boundary they describe were more real than the architecture containing it. The fourth floor takes on repetition: Same Picture and Cutting Sculpture demonstrate how perfect formal correspondence can produce division.

Installation view of basement floor at KIM Inbai A Man Asleep exhibition with triangular drawing and angled sculpture — Installation view, KIM Inbai: A Man Asleep, Arario Gallery Seoul, 2026. Courtesy the artist and Arario Gallery.

KIM Inbai (b. 1978, Seoul) holds a BFA and MFA in sculpture from Hongik University. His formative Arario Gallery Seoul solo, “Eliminate Points, Lines and Planes” (2014), proposed erasing the three elements that underpin Western visual language; the decade since has tested what that erasure reveals. Works from intervening years—CHILD (Arario Gallery Shanghai, 2019) and Do You Remember Love (Perigee Gallery, 2020)—have moved between figure and abstraction without settling the question. “A Man Asleep” feels like a consolidation, and the most philosophically rigorous show of his career in Seoul. His work is held by the Seoul Museum of Art, the Busan Museum of Art, and the Daegu Art Museum; in 2024 he received the 35th Kim Se-Choong Youth Sculpture Award.

KIM Inbai: A Man Asleep is on view at Arario Gallery Seoul, 85 Yulgok-ro, Jongno-gu, through 24 October 2026. Gallery hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 11 am–6 pm.

Tags: contemporary sculpture, A Man Asleep, Arario Gallery, Georges Perec, KIM Inbai, Korean art