Junghyun Kim

In the early history of photography, glass was essential not only as a medium for camera lenses but also as a protective surface in framing. This connection between photography and glass continues in the digital age, where smartphone screens serve as portals to our sensory worlds, integrating countless images into daily life. The exhibition draws on this material lineage, considering how glass—and fragility more broadly—resonates in both historic and contemporary image-making.

Through distinct approaches, Kai Oh and Juyon Lee come together in their reimagining of fragility as a generative space. Their shared identities as Asian women, immigrants, artists, and thinkers form a common layer of expression. The exhibition is informed by scholar Judith Butler’s idea that fragility, rather than a condition to avoid, is inherently relational, distinctly human, and vital to action. Recognizing human precariousness encourages ethical engagement through mutual connection.

In this selection of works, Juyon Lee engages with fragility as an ontological inevitability shaped by grief and memory, while Kai Oh examines the systemic vulnerabilities of human perception, easily affected by algorithmic mediation. Both artists work with delicate materials such as glass and paper, referencing the essential components of traditional photography while highlighting their dual qualities: transparency and protection, rupture and connection.

Oh uses glass not only to support photographs but as an integral part of the image itself. She captures everyday scenes with her smartphone and manipulates them to introduce depth and movement. Her surreal compositions reflect on clarity and limitation. In her Double Glass Series (2024), Oh combines shattered glass with printed images to question the authenticity and completeness of digital media.

In her new work Vulnerable and Naked (2025), Oh uses paper as a symbol of embodied resistance. Easily torn, soaked, or damaged—and one of the most fundamental materials in photography—paper becomes a site of transformation when folded, layered, and altered, offering new ways to envision topography. Seeking to move beyond algorithmic logic, she focuses on sensory observation through walking, noticing, and breaking familiar patterns. By layering hand-drawn pencil sketches onto digitally manipulated and collaged photographs, she highlights what is fundamentally human: the tactile, emotional, and perceptive qualities that artificial intelligence often overlooks but that remain central to lived experience.

Juyon Lee presents Weighing of the Light (2025), a work that emerged from mourning the death of her grandfather. Confronted with the natural cycle of blooming and fading over time, Lee reflects on the helplessness of the human condition in the face of inevitability, while also revealing how the love and memories left behind continue to sustain life. As she joined her grandfather’s final moments through FaceTime, the experience prompted an acceptance of loss and a deeper inquiry into the meaning of existence.

Lee also draws on a collection of images captured over years of video calls with her family who live far away. These include glimpses of daily life, fragments of text, and flattened images of their bodies from screenshots and recordings of their time together. Through these visual materials, she conveys the emotional and physical distance between Seoul and New York, along with feelings of tenderness, longing, absence, and loss. Her process involves transforming printed photographs into thread-like forms, weaving them by hand, and firing them in a kiln to produce glass. This slow, handcrafted method weakens the image while also reinforcing its presence. By exposing the photograph to intense heat in order to transform it into glass, Lee reinterprets fragility not as a weakness but as a quality formed through time, care, and labor.

Across this exhibition, the ideas of vulnerability, weakness, loss, and breakability serve as foundations for strength, connection, and transformation. Through Fragility reveals how that which is most delicate can become the very ground from which resilience and resistance emerge.

Support for Baxter St’s Guest Curatorial Program is provided by the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.

Participating Artists

Kai Oh & Juyon Lee

Curated by

Junghyun Kim

Graphic Design

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