Gyeonggi Ceramics Biennale 2026

As you enter the darkened space, you will see Seongmahn Ahn’s ceramic forms, which resemble stalactites, alongside a video work developed in collaboration with Jongsoo Lee.

Ahn explores the meeting point between the material qualities of ceramics and digital fabrication. For the artist, a ceramic 3D printer is not a machine for producing perfect forms. Instead, it is another tool for revealing the properties of clay and the ways it can change. Porcelain clay emerges from a nozzle and builds up in fine layers, but it responds to moisture, pressure, and gravity, causing it to sag and shift slightly. Firing and glazing then cause the forms to shrink and crack, producing surfaces that differ from the original design.

Traces of Clay takes inspiration from the way limestone caves form over immense spans of time. Take a closer look at the ceramic forms around you. Just as stalactites and stalagmites gradually grow through the accumulation of water and minerals, these works take shape as fine lines of clay build up layer by layer. Through digital fabrication, Ahn compresses a process that takes thousands or even tens of thousands of years in nature into a much shorter timescale.

The video work 45 Days, developed in collaboration with Jongsoo Lee, extends the ideas of repetition, accumulation, and change found in Ahn’s work into moving images. Rather than replaying a finished video, the work continues to change throughout the 45 days of the exhibition. Real-time information such as the number and movement of visitors, the time of day, and the weather affects the image, continually changing its movement, density, speed, and rhythm. New changes build on what came before, and visitors themselves become part of what shapes the work. What you see today will not be exactly what you see tomorrow.

Ahn’s ceramic forms are shaped by the properties of clay, gravity, and fire, while the images in 45 Days change in response to people, weather, time, and data. In neither work is the final form fully determined in advance. Instead, each continues to change as different conditions come into play over time.

Look closely at the traces of clay built up layer by layer and at the constantly changing images around you. Here, people and machines, matter and time all take part in shaping the work.