Woojae Kim

"A dog can never tell you what she knows from the

smells of the world, but you know, watching her,

that you know

almost nothing."

—Mary Oliver, Dog Songs

Psychic Readings is pleased to present Woojae Kim's Esperanza Window Trap, a solo exhibition.

In Esperanza Window Trap, artist Woojae Kim examines the sensorial space of "the unsmelled": a threshold of olfaction beyond human perception. The absence of the word, unsmelled, points to the lack of sensory, linguistic, and conceptual tools to acknowledge what lies outside of our ability to smell. Yet nonhuman animals navigate this realm effortlessly: dogs tracking scent trails, for example, or mosquitoes detecting their prey's breath from afar. Through rigorous material experimentation and research, Kim's works attune viewers to the molecular scale of semiochemicals: airborne compounds that signal human presence to other species.

The exhibition is inspired by the Esperanza Window Trap, a device used to attract parasite-carrying black flies using a Carbon Dioxide source, human sweat, and netting. Kim first began researching chemical markers in 2019 and, by referencing the original Esperanza Window Trap, has forged his own elaborate dispersal system of human semiochemicals, suspended in hand-blown glass orbs. Researchers have located the chemical portrait of the human presence in five molecules: 1-octen-3-ol (interestingly, mushroom alcohol), 1-octanol, acetophenone, hexanal, and ammonium bicarbonate.

In the installation, plastic containers of yeast, water, and sugar ferment and feed carbon dioxide—acting as the human breath—through hoses into the glass chambers, compounding the molecules with each passage and dispersing them into the air. The resulting fragrance rewards acute attention, with its full grassiness and base note of earthy mushroom. It is unplaceable but distinct: a rarified portrait of the human presence as perceived by our nonhuman kin.

On two custom speakers, an instrumental sonic work rings through the space. Combining Kim's original music on handmade instrumentals with field recordings of insects, the track is transportive to a sticky, spiritual, remote wilderness. The work's vibratory quality and range of frequencies further disperses the scent by pushing, sculpting, and activating the airspace of the gallery, making it hum with life.

Kim's low sculptural forms invite close, crouched inspection. A handmade wooden screen displays foraged objects, polypores, mosquito-shaped fishing lures, and glass tools used in perfume production: poetic references to Kim's own entanglements with the natural world. By drawing attention to ground-level—where heavier scent molecules also tend to gather—the installation encourages a recalibration of our corporeal awareness.

As Kim describes: “In the territory of the unsmelled, we are known by the chemical products of our bodily functions— the processes of living. We are in a relationship of sensing.”[1]

Esperanza Window Trap marks the first physical manifestation of Kim’s original research into semiochemicals and olfactory biological messaging. In an anthropocentric episteme that locates knowledge production primarily in the visual realm—where identity markers like class, culture, and race are also encoded—Kim effectively decenters visualist logics in favor of the experiential, haptic cognition of scent. By gesturing towards the limitations of human perception, the exhibition encourages an interspecies mode of sensing. With a focus on mutual relationality and reciprocity, Esperanza Window Trap foregrounds the intimacy of scent as an equalizing means of knowing, remembering, relating, and being.

Woojae Kim is a Korean artist and writer living on the unceded territories of the Sḵwxwú7mesh, Musqueam, and ̱ Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver, Canada). His works explore rituals of interdependency and listening to inaudible frequencies of relationships with non-humans and the land.

His work has recently been exhibited at Artspeak, Access Gallery in Vancouver, and Dreams Comma Delta in Ladner. His texts were published in the Canadian Art and the Capilano Review. Kim received an MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. He was long listed for the Sobey Art Award 2023.

—Sofia Thiệu D'Amico

1 - Woojae Kim, “The Territory of the Unsmelled,” Canadianart, 10 December 2020. https://canadianart.ca/essays/woojae-kim-the-territory-of-the-unsmelled/