“Both pieces come out of the same question really: what happens to a person once another person is involved, and what happens to identity once you actually look at it closely instead of assuming it's one solid thing.”

In his phenomenological account of the gaze, Sartre describes how the presence of another person can transform the self from subject into object. For Sartre, the Other’s look reveals the self as an unstable, relational experience, perceived as an object by another consciousness, thereby disrupting the illusion of a purely self-contained identity. The London-based, Korean-born artist Da Ye Kim expands this further, not as a philosophical abstraction, detached from a personal angle, but with jewellery that physically binds two individuals together to talk about human relationships, or even sculptures that multiply into hundreds of faces the moment you approach them to represent the multitude of the self. Kim's body of work asks: what happens with identity once it's witnessed, shared, and touched? The answer, she suggests, is that it is deeply connected to the people and environments around us.

This concern with relational encounters becomes especially poignant when read alongside Kim’s experience of social surveillance. As someone who can trace her artistic and theoretical investigation back to her childhood in Korea, Kim describes growing up constantly trying to fit into a shell that was not her own, making an effort to blend in under others' expectations of "don't do the thing they don't like, stay settled into the group." In the ongoing series This Relationship Is…(2023-ongoing), the rings embody this tension between individual desire and the pressure to conform to a group. In Sartre’s account of the gaze, he defines it as an unsettling moment where we encounter ourselves as an object for another person. Kim’s rings expand this problem, asking whether being seen can also be connected with mutual dependence, maintenance, and care. Designed to be worn by two people, the rings symbolise these conflicting relationships, as movements and reactions become a single action, directly affecting each other, creating a physical negotiation of mutual visibility. The work continuously stages a constant contradiction between the collective expectation Kim associates with her Korean upbringing and the expectations of individualism she encounters in contemporary Western art.

This collection started with Kim's relationship with her sister and took inspiration from an old sixteenth-century Fontainebleau portrait of Gabrielle d'Estrées of two sisters in the bath, where one reaches over and touches the other, and the meaning of the gesture is quite ambiguous. From here, after some digital rendering, the format of the rings appeared. The jewellery may seem decorative because of its polished edges and forms, but there is a deep philosophical interpretation that lies beneath it. Focusing on Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics concept that art can be a "state of encounter rather than an object", the artist positions her practice as a relational device that produces interaction rather than merely representing it. By presenting the rings as dual-wearers and making the interaction occasionally uncomfortable, Kim creates temporary micro-communities but not necessarily harmonious ones. The participants create a relational network produced through friction, dependence, and negotiation of movement, a metaphor for the complex dynamics within social spheres. 

"Close up, you notice the ridges, the slightly imperfect fit, the places I had to go back and correct. I'm not trying to say the relationship gets resolved by the end. What I'm actually interested in is maintenance, how you keep showing up for somebody even when it's difficult." The artist explained in our interview.

Another facet within Kim's body of work can be seen in Face Face Face (2023), where hundreds of uncanny faces appear to look back at the viewer, reversing the gaze and making the observer aware of their own act of looking. This work conceptually touches on the Jungian psychology of the plural self, where the artist cites Jung's idea that "the psyche isn't one voice but many" and that personalities can shift and morph upon contact with different people and environments, like "chemical substances." The simple geometrical outer shape can be read as the neat social image presented to others, while the distorted faces may evoke the shadow: the less manageable psychic material that such an outer form attempts to contain.

A further aspect of these pieces is their material choice. Kim deliberately applies patina to the brass so the sculptures become a "record of how many relationships the work has passed through," as the worn patina registers contact, introducing haptic perception, the phenomenology of touch as a form of knowing. As viewers touched the sculptures, the patina wore off, and its altered surface became a partial physical record of the work's encounter with people. Illustrating how the self is shaped in the same way, contrasting clearly with a more traditional “do not touch" museum culture, the artist demands a more tactile and embodied engagement to create a cycle of meaning and interpretation.

The sculptures give us a glimpse of the self’s unknowability. Their hundreds of small casts are directly influenced by Francis Bacon's distorted self-portraits, exploring how a face can refuse to resolve into a single, stable likeness. This is also visually represented by the simple geometrical outer forms that signify the flat version of identity and the crowd of selves (cast from Kim's own face, manipulated and sculpted in ZBrush), first cast as wax objects and then cast in brass. By utilising this material and sculptural volumes, the sculptures allow a perspective shift: from a distance you can only see a single solid object, and as you move closer, you are confronted with faces watching you.

"There's a Korean saying I keep coming back to, that you can know ten ways into the water but not one way into a person's heart. It means a person is ambiguous, and finally unknowable." The artist explained.

Moving a step further, Kim's upcoming new series, Connective Jewellery, turns jewellery into a physical archive of lived experience. Externalising one aspect of Dan McAdams's Narrative Identity Theory, Kim visually represents, throughout this project, identity not as a static list of traits but "an internalised and evolving story that integrates the reconstructed past, perceived present, and anticipated future into a coherent whole." What distinguishes this project from the previous ones is that the internal story investigated in past projects now becomes external, with participants recounting the memories attached to their most treasured jewellery, and those narratives become transcribed and layered onto exact replicas of the objects themselves.

In This Relationship Is…(2023-ongoing), the artist explored the tension between two individuals, and Face Face Face (2023) reveals the multitude within one self; the connective jewellery project expands outward into a palimpsest of memory, a wearable life story that fuses object, text, and testimony into a single entity. The transcribed text becomes like a mushroom or membrane growing onto the object's surface, so the object is not merely a copy of the original but embodies why it matters, visually telling us what that person is connected to. 

Kim's work offers a different understanding of jewellery, where it's not merely decorative but a network of memory, connection, and relationality. It proposes a model of identity as relationship-based rather than self-contained and allows us to see human relationships as nodes in a vast, growing network rather than independent units. Yet these encounters do not make for a clean interpretation of self. They leave traces of care, friction, memory, dependency, and social obligation that forge how a person becomes visible without ever becoming completely resolved. 

Know more about the artist's work here. 

Cover Image: 

Detail of Face Face Face (Diamond) (2023). Bronze with patination. 10 x 20 x 10 cm. 2.1kg. Image courtesy of Da Ye Kim