Opening on Saturday 04.04.2026 from 6 pm to 9 pm.
04.04 – 13.06.2026

The microscopic sculptures of the South Korean artist Jin Ham originate from his child’s games with modelling clay. The material he likes to use is coloured polymer clay with which he shapes forms without any particular tool.

His sculptures are entirely the meeting between the tips of his fingers and clay, mixing the sensation of touch, the other senses and time as well. By transforming themselves, they become the subjects of their own lives and desires. Their colours created in an instinctive and spontaneous way by the figures and their forms created from the figures let coexist the concrete and the abstract. Through his mind and heart, they take mysterious, original, extremely meticulous forms that acquire a soul. This presence has been contained for a long time and looks in the face at an « ego » of the artist which has not yet been made aware. Like a dancer who tells a story with the movements of his body, the artist’s finger movements are gestures that build the physical state of the material and its visible aspect. Taking root on the reality, his works are various hybrid creations with several dimensions superimposed. This is an implicit confession about his personal life and a tribute to all the forms of life that exist.

His works charge small insignificant living beings with energy and inexhaustible vitality, which is sometimes beautiful but also sad and grotesque. As the artist says, he is more interested in mosses and lichens than in trees and also more in algae and clumps of shells stuck on rocks than in the sea. He says he receives more inspiration from these little things. At the age of 27, Jin Ham was invited to the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005 to participate in the Korean Pavilion. He drew a personal anecdote from it by telling that small-sized works were installed on the handrail of the wooden railing of the terrace of the Korean pavilion. As time goes by, Ham had observed those works began to disappear like magic. Subsequently, he understood that the « ants » were responsible for this phenomenon. The handrail being the « path » taken by these ants, his works constituted obstacles they wanted to eliminate. The artist claims to have seen moments when insects would tear pieces and transport them away. After that, he was able to show his works by taking the precaution of covering them with glasses.

At the moment when we lean in to observe the microscopic sculptures, through the forms of different colours and aspects, full of vitality he created with the tip of his hands, the artist offers us to accompany him in his MICROmégas singular universe.

Jin Ham (born in 1978, in South Korea) graduated in Fine Arts from Kyungwon University in South Korea. His artistic practice is based on microscopic sculptures, made with ordinary, even insignificant materials, expressing his inspiration at the same time. When he begins a work, he does not set himself any precise and conscious goal. The work builds itself, through various narratives, humour, grotesque, as well as cynical caricature of reality and ends in an unexpected fashion. The created universe can remind us the fantastic. The artist has exhibited in numerous personal and collective exhibitions, in South Korea and international places, such as the Seoul National University Museum of Art (2017), the Guangzhou Triennial (2012), the Espace Louis Vuitton, the Oude Warande Park in Tilburg (2008), the Musée de design et d’art appliqué contemporains de Lausanne (2006), the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (2005) and the 51st Venice Biennale (2005) as an invited artist by the Korean Pavilion.