Keunwook Ji fills the picture plane by drawing countless lines in colored pencil against a ruler. Rather than transcribing visible objects, he finds the starting point of his work in the blind spots of vision that even science cannot explain. Imagining minute forces beyond the eye’s grasp, he seeks to create paintings that remain open—paintings through which something can pass.

Ji majored in printmaking at the College of Fine Arts, Hongik University, earned a master’s degree in Art and Science from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and received a doctorate in painting from the Graduate School of Hongik University. He has since developed a practice of abstract painting built on the painstaking act of drawing lines, inspired by the visual data that science produces. He has held solo exhibitions at Hakgojae, Sungkok Art Museum, and Schema Art Museum, among others, and took part in a number of group exhibitions in London during his studies there. He was selected for the Sungkok Art Museum Open Call in 2024, and in 2026 for the Promising Track of the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture’s Creative Support Program.

Ji’s work begins with colored pencils and a ruler. Guided by the ruler, he fills the surface with innumerable lines, maintaining consistent spacing and pressure. This act is not mere depiction but a process of building up actual layers of pigment on the canvas. The endlessly superimposed lines produce subtle ridges and textures across the surface. Recently, he has introduced stainless-steel pigment, drawing the materiality of metal into the picture plane. This metallic surface shifts in reflection and depth according to the angle of light, so that the impression of the work changes with every movement of the viewer.

Ji’s encounter with colored pencils was close to chance. In 2015, at the start of his studies in the UK, he brought a set of colored pencils from Korea, intending to use them to sign his prints. When a pencil touched the canvas and crumbled, the trace it left resembled the smallest unit of an image—a single particle—and his current work began there. The artist recalls being drawn to the way accumulated colored-pencil lines produce a difference that “looks solid and upright from a distance, but up close appears as fragile as the fuzz of yarn.” His reason for insisting on the ruler alongside the colored pencil is equally clear: in his view, the straight lines drawn against a ruler paradoxically underscore “a human act that can never be perfectly mechanical.”

At this year’s Kiaf, Keunwook Ji presents his Space Engine series. These works take as their underdrawings celestial images—captured and transformed by the artist—that the virtual universe simulation of the same name renders on a scientific basis. Most of the works on view belong to the Metallic series, in which stainless-steel pigment is layered over colored pencil, including Space Engine – Metallic Field, built of accumulated layers, and Space Engine – Metallic Wings, traversed by a diagonal grain. The artist hopes that viewers will attend less to any particular narrative than to the visual information and sensation carried by the lines themselves. “I want to leave a somewhat event-like resonance,” he says, “as if one had briefly entered and then emerged from a world where space-time slips out of joint and lets things pass through.”