Lim Won Ji (ONEG)

Lim Won Ji (ONEG) is a South Korean artist currently pursuing an MFA in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She earned her BFA in Ceramics & Glass from Hongik University, where she developed a material-based practice grounded in close attention to how materials respond to pressure, gravity, heat, and time.

Her work examines hypervigilance as a bodily condition shaped by anxiety, anticipation, and the persistent desire for control. Repetitive acts such as aligning, securing, correcting, and regulating become central gestures in her practice. Rather than treating these actions as solutions to anxiety, she approaches them as visible manifestations of it—temporary attempts to stabilize uncertainty that ultimately reveal the impossibility of complete control.

Working across sculpture, installation, and process-based experimentation, Lim constructs systems that initially suggest order and stability but gradually expose their vulnerability. She often uses materials such as hog casing, rotting fruit, rope, wire, and other substances that stretch, sag, dry, decay, knot, or resist containment. These materials function not as passive media but as active agents that disrupt the structures designed to regulate them.

While rooted in personal experience, her practice also considers broader environments shaped by surveillance, uncertainty, and continuous self-regulation. Through unstable structures and ongoing material transformation, she explores how anxiety becomes embedded in physical gestures, spatial arrangements, and material behavior. Her work remains within the unresolved tension between structure and collapse, regulation and unpredictability, asking how bodies continually negotiate control through material and space.