Royal College of Art (group residency) / Raon (Donghyeon) Kim

photo Simon Beckmann

Royal College of Art (group residency) / Raon (Donghyeon) Kim / fashion

Raon (Donghyeon) Kim (b. 1994, South Korea) works across fashion, sculpture, and installation. His work explores how intimacy, care, and power are shaped within relationships and everyday life. Instead of seeing intimacy as only a personal feeling, Kim looks at it as something built through repeated actions, shared limits, and what remains after an experience seems to end.

Kim sees the body not as something fixed or closed, but as something connected to garments, objects, touch, and relationships. Through clothing, objects, and installations, he uses materials to show how memory, touch, and time can build up on surfaces. By layering and transforming materials, his work reveals traces of pressure, use, and emotional experience.

Queer experience is important in his practice, not as a fixed identity, but as a way of questioning social ideas about desire, care, and legitimacy. Rather than giving clear answers or turning intimacy into spectacle, Kim focuses on what stays behind: how contact and closeness continue to shape bodies, surfaces, and everyday life, even after they are no longer fully visible or easy to describe.

In partnership with the Royal College of Art, this group residency at Joya: AiR was curated by guest artist Annie Edwards (GBA 26, MA RCA, BFA) www.annieedwards.com