17 June 2026
Artist Highlight - Seungjoo Mun
Interview and Review
Seungjoo Mun is a Korean-born, UK-based jewellery artist working at the intersection of sculptural form and wearable object. A persistent curiosity about hidden structures drives her practice: the internal logic of how things are made, broken, and transformed, and what these processes expose about the nature of objects themselves.
A graduate of Birmingham City University's School of Jewellery and current Artist in Residence (2025–2026), her work has been recognised internationally, including as a Finalist in the Progold 3D DfAM Contest 2026. Through material experimentation, Mun redefines jewellery as a structural inquiry made wearable.
ARTIST INTERVIEW
1. The Spine series draws on the body’s internal structure as a conceptual model. What led you to use the spine as a framework for these jewellery pieces?
The Spine series began with a personal observation: I found the remnants left during making more meaningful than the finished surface. This prompted a question: where does essence truly reside? Whilst considering this, I naturally thought of the human spine. It enables form and movement yet remains almost entirely unrecognised beneath the skin. I wanted to work with this logic of invisible yet essential structure within jewellery, and the spine became both a conceptual framework and a structural model for the series.
2. Your work focuses on remnants and fragments from the making process. What interests you about elevating these overlooked elements into the final work?
I don't see fragments and remnants as by-products. They carry traces of decisions, adjustments, and hesitations that occur during making. Typically, these elements are removed to achieve a polished finish, but I feel the essence of the work remains within them. Rather than using the physical fragments themselves, I adopt their role as hidden yet essential carriers of process, and make that the structural principle of the work. What interests me is shifting attention from surface to the underlying logic that sustains it. In this way, the pieces reveal not only the completed form but the act of making itself.
3. The forms appear both skeletal and architectural. How does your sculptural background influence the structural language of the pieces?
My background in sculpture means I approach jewellery less as decorative objects and more as small sculptures with internal logic. I consider balance, structure, and spatial relationships in the same way I would with sculpture. This thinking shaped the formal language of the Spine series. The forms emerge from structural considerations rather than ornamental ones, which is why they read as both skeletal and architectural. For me, jewellery is a small sculpture experienced close to the body.
4. Within The Invisible Made Visible, your work foregrounds the hidden frameworks that support form. What aspects of structure or process do you hope viewers become aware of when encountering these pieces?
As an observer, I'm drawn to the aesthetic qualities of art, even when they serve no practical purpose. But as a maker, I'm drawn to something more fundamental. What holds the most important role yet receives the least attention? This question led to the Spine collection, which asks viewers to look beyond visible form toward what quietly supports it. I hope it invites people to consider where essence might reside, not in what we immediately see. If someone becomes curious about the relationship between form and structure, then the work is doing what I hoped.
WHAT STAYS HIDDEN
Review by Chih-Yang Chen, Art Director
Seungjoo Mun’s Spine series doesn’t try to impress at first glance. It holds back a little. The pieces feel open, almost incomplete, as if something has been deliberately left exposed rather than resolved.
The idea of the spine sits quietly behind the work. Not as an image, but as a way of thinking. It’s something that supports, holds everything together, yet is rarely seen. Seungjoo brings that same logic into jewellery, shifting attention away from surface and towards what sits underneath.
Instead of polished finishes or decorative detail, the pieces are built around structure. They feel closer to frameworks than objects, something that holds form rather than covers it. There’s a sense that what we’re seeing is usually hidden, like the inside of something turned outward.
What makes the work interesting is how it deals with process. Rather than presenting fragments or remnants directly, Seungjoo seems to work from their logic. The small decisions, adjustments, and hesitations that happen during making are not erased. They become part of how the piece is constructed. It’s less about showing process, and more about letting it shape the work from within.
There’s also a certain restraint in how the pieces occupy space. They don’t sit heavily on the body or try to dominate it. Instead, they balance lightly, almost cautiously. Gaps and openings play as much of a role as the material itself. This gives the work a kind of tension, as if it’s holding itself together while still remaining slightly unstable.
What stays with you is not a single form, but a question. Where does the essence of something actually sit? In what we see, or in what allows it to exist in the first place?
Seungjoo doesn’t answer this directly. The work simply shifts the focus. It slows you down just enough to notice what usually goes unseen, the quiet structures that support everything else.