For Addresses Without Names at max goelitz in Munich, Germany, Ju Young Kim rebuilds the fittings of airplanes and waiting rooms in leaded and fused glass, an overhead bin remade as a lit stained-glass panel.
Ju Young Kim builds her work from the places that hold a body for a few hours and then let it go. Airplanes, trains, waiting rooms, hotels, temporary apartments: with Addresses Without Names, her show at max goelitz, she turns toward their close, bodily side, the way a seat fabric or a curtain can feel familiar without being tied to any single memory. Kim calls this condition “anonymous familiarity”, the recognition of something whose origin can no longer be located.
The gallery is split in two. A separate room is set inside the existing space at the back, its walls painted ochre to half height, giving the section a warm, domestic feel. On the entrance door, a film printed with a lace motif filters the view and holds the two areas half open. What results is a threshold that reads as neither fully private nor public, a pause between arrival and departure, familiarity and estrangement.
Suspended at the center is She slept better when nothing stayed still, the largest work to date from Kim’s ongoing series AEROPLASTICS, where salvaged aircraft parts meet hand-worked glass. An overhead luggage bin becomes a lit construction of smooth, ribbed and sanded glass held with lead cames. Below it hang six reading lights in different shades of white leaded glass, their geometry closer to Art Deco than to any cabin. Here Kim draws roses in lead and writes the Korean word for “thank you” in her own hand, a motif she knows from napkins in Korean restaurants, a shared visual language folded into private memory.
Around it sit smaller glass works based on textile structures: upholstery weaves and lace, translated pane by pane. A pattern might recall the interior of the London Underground or the seat of a Japanese airline while also standing in for a blanket from childhood. The titles carry the same doubling, She always left the blue unused, She remembered exactly what it felt like. Their dimensions follow the standardized formats of seats and headrests, keeping each piece the size of the body it once touched.
The tension between craft and industry is already written into these fabrics. Mechanized weaving turned once-handmade motifs into serial production, a shift Kim reads through Anni Albers, who rethought textile structure, grid and material across craft and the machine. Kim pushes it further, carrying reproduced weaves into glass and reworking them slowly by hand, so that fragile hand-cut surfaces sit beside factory-made aircraft parts and the standardized fittings of public transport. Some of the pieces were made during a residency at the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington.
What the show finally argues is that transit has become less a matter of geography than of the body. Memory survives as a material impression, a texture or colour that stays after the place is gone. Home, in Kim’s account, is less a fixed address than something rebuilt again and again from such fragments, a temporary sense of familiarity carried from one arrival to the next.
