Text by PURPLEHAZE
The Work
Wonji Lim is a Korean sculpture artist based in Chicago, known for installations built from organic materials that decay, sag and resist containment. Working under the name Oneg, she examines hypervigilance as a bodily condition rather than an emotional state.
Her works begin with structures that suggest rational order: grids, frames, supports, containers, knots, suspended systems. They appear stable, but their stability depends on continual maintenance. Securing, knotting, aligning, tightening. The more the gesture is repeated, the more clearly it reveals that complete control is impossible.
The condition she describes is not only personal. Hypervigilance emerges from environments shaped by surveillance, uncertainty, productivity and continuous self regulation. These pressures settle into gestures, into spatial arrangements, into how a body occupies and negotiates a room.
Her practice sits alongside a lineage of artists who let material misbehave, from Eva Hesse to a younger generation of Korean artists working with visceral and unstable matter.
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Materials: Rope, Hog Casing and Soil
Lim works with matter that refuses containment. Organic material, hog casing, rope, soil, wood and flexible membranes stretch, sag, dry, decay and loosen over time.
Material here is not a passive medium but an active agent that interrupts and transforms the system built to regulate it. Gravity pulls, membranes contract, ropes slacken, and instability unfolds inside structures that first appeared ordered. Sculpture with organic materials means accepting that the work will not stay the same, and that the artist is not entirely in charge of it.
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In Her Words
I have long felt compelled to organize my surroundings. To align objects precisely, rewrite a page because of a single mistake, and repeat small acts of correction until they appear temporarily resolved. Rather than understanding hypervigilance simply as an intensified emotional state, I approach it as a sustained bodily condition shaped by anticipation. Rather than treating repetition as a means of resolving anxiety, I approach it as both a symptom and a structure that sustains it.
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Biography
Lim Won Ji received her BFA in Ceramics and Glass from Hongik University, Seoul, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She works across sculpture, installation, performance and process based experimentation, and lives in Chicago.
WONJI LIM
Artist Wonji Lim @zeal.ji_
Words PURPLEHAZE
Images Courtesy of the artist
Open Call 013 UNSCRIPTED is accepting submissions until 11 October. Submission is free for all artists. Submit your work here.
