KwanYoung Kim’s 2022 solo exhibition Forgotten but Not Gone presents a series of new formal and material experiments developed within his ongoing project, The Memories of the Unconscious. While the project has long explored the vast and elusive terrain of the unconscious through color, gesture, and abstraction, this exhibition marks a shift in the way its visual language is structured and perceived.

The Memories of the Unconscious is conceived as an extended body of work tracing the artist’s introspective engagement with memory and the unconscious. Planned as a project of up to one thousand works, it unfolds through compositions of points, lines, planes, and color, without being bound to fixed forms or conventional spatial structures. Each work becomes a fragment within a larger field, suggesting memories that emerge, disappear, and return across a psychological space that exceeds linear time.

In Forgotten but Not Gone, KwanYoung Kim directs attention away from the center of the image. By leaving the central field open and dispersing forms toward the edges, he creates a different spatial tension within the composition. The empty center does not function as absence alone. Instead, it produces a pause—a space through which the surrounding forms become more distinct, allowing the viewer’s attention to move between emptiness and accumulation.

This compositional shift also reflects the exhibition’s engagement with memory itself. Rather than presenting memory as something clearly preserved or completely lost, KwanYoung Kim approaches it as something that may recede from consciousness while continuing to remain within us. The exhibition is grounded in the belief that memories can be forgotten over time without fully disappearing. What has seemingly vanished may still persist in another form, suspended somewhere within the unconscious.

Color remains central to this process. In KwanYoung Kim’s work, the unconscious is not represented through identifiable scenes or narratives, but through color itself. Layers of vivid hues, shifting surfaces, and varied materials create a field in which memory is experienced less as an image than as sensation. The differences between media introduce changes in depth, texture, transparency, and reflection, expanding the ways in which each work can be perceived.

Through these experiments, Forgotten but Not Gone positions memory as something unstable yet persistent: dispersed rather than fixed, obscured rather than erased. The works do not attempt to recover the past in its original form. Instead, they trace the ways in which what has been forgotten continues to inhabit the present.

As part of the broader trajectory of The Memories of the Unconscious, this exhibition represents another stage in KwanYoung Kim’s continuing investigation into how memory can be transformed into visual form. Rather than moving toward a final conclusion, the project continues to accumulate, fragment, and reorganize itself—much like the unconscious it seeks to explore.