How is privacy created? Through a closed-off room? A sign prohibiting entry? Or simply in the moment we believe no one is watching us?

In her solo exhibition Ooopsy! It’s My Privacy, Jinhee Kim explores the private realm as a fragile situation between visibility and retreat. The starting point is a childhood memory of the artist’s: a fascination with doors labeled “No Entry” or “Staff Only.” What lay behind them usually turned out to be unspectacular—a storage room, perhaps, or a purely functional space. Yet it is precisely this discrepancy between expectation and reality that forms the core of the exhibition.

Kim shows her protagonists engaged in gestures that usually go unnoticed or are considered embarrassing: picking their noses, biting their nails, picking at their teeth. They happen casually, seem a bit silly, and we all recognise them from our everyday lives. For this exact reason, they are universally relatable. Intimacy emerges here less through grand emotions than through a high degree of recognition. The depicted figures seem to look out of the painting directly at the viewers, activating them. In this way, the audience’s role shifts from a distanced observer to a participant in the scene. The private is both revealed and made experiential.

The relationship between seeing and being seen is deeply anchored in art history. With Johannes Vermeer, the interior becomes a stage for silent observation. Edgar Degas depicts seemingly unobserved intimate moments, thereby reflecting on the voyeuristic structure of the gaze. Finally, with Marcel Duchamp’s assemblage Étant donnés, the act of seeing itself is architecturally regulated: the artist directs the viewers’ gaze through a physical keyhole. Privacy appears here as something that is only produced through restriction. Kim takes up this tradition but shifts its direction. Behind her metaphorical thresholds, no salacious secret is hidden. The “No Entry” does not lead to a revelation, but to a confrontation with seemingly incidental moments. It is precisely in this shift that a space opens up for a different reading of privacy—not as an exclusive secret, but as a shared human experience. The artwork titles also pick up on this tension: several of them, inspired by pop songs from Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, or Meghan Trainor, underscore this ambivalence. Their lightness contrasts with the art-historically charged question of voyeurism and intimacy, simultaneously anchoring the exhibition in contemporary visual and pop culture.

Kim’s painting has always been dedicated to brief, inconspicuous moments. Light plays a central role here: it models the figures, opens up imaginary realms beyond the visible, and lends the flat pictorial spaces a subtle depth. Formally, Kim’s figures are softly modeled, rounded, and anonymous. Skin color, gender, or social attributions are deliberately left open. It is an attitude that is also tied to her own biography between Seoul and Berlin, understanding identity as a fluid category. The figures cannot be definitively categorised anywhere, which is exactly what makes them feel familiar. Even in her earlier works, her scenes had a stage-like quality: dramatic lighting, clear compositions, a latent theatricality. At Weserhalle, this quality is consistently expanded into the spatial realm for the first time. The paintings detach themselves from the wall, stepping into the room as experiential structures that can even be touched. The striking oak frames correspond with the coloration of the paintings, simultaneously turning them into physical furnishings. The image becomes an object, the object becomes a stage, and perception is intensified through movement. This expansion of painting shifts the perceptual conditions of the image itself: it is no longer solely the depiction, but also the movement of the viewers that becomes part of the experience. Kim executes recurring motifs like mirrors, window panes, or screens differently in terms of technique: she spray-paints them instead of using a brush, marking them as zones of medial reflection. They function as thresholds between inside and outside, between body and image. Privacy thus appears less as a closed-off room and more as something that unfolds across such surfaces.

Ooopsy! It’s My Privacy proposes a quiet but precise shift that directs the focus toward the experience of being imperfect and present at the same time.

—Text by Julia Meyer-Brehm