Senior Sulli Yatabe and Alum Josephine Kim Present “I’ll Leave an Empty Space for You”

The duo exhibition at The Frame Gallery explored something absent, not yet here, or already gone.

By Amelia De Leon

On Friday, March 20, The Frame Gallery’s doors opened to showcase “I’ll leave an empty space for you,” a duo exhibition featuring the works of senior Sulli Yatabe and alum Josephine Kim (BSA ’25). Through a shared lens of fragmentation, both artists investigate the fragility of memory, home, and the inevitable passage of time. The opening served as a deep meditation on how we carry our pasts. Whether through the meticulous patchwork of a family table or a fading memory, the show explored the in-between states where presence and absence collide.

Kim translates her deeply rooted poetry practice into visual art, treating the canvas as a patchwork of images that simultaneously conceal and describe the history beneath. Her works utilize intimate domestic vessels such as a family dining table, a patchwork runner, or plants from her mother’s garden to anchor personal relationships and familial history. Utilizing recurring motifs of melting candles and drying tomato calyces, Kim’s work acts as a poignant reminder of transience. Her compositions often splinter into fragments and corridors, in favor of a layered, lyrical structure.

In Yatabe’s work, nothing is fixed and presence remains quietly unsettled within the abstract, emotional spaces they create. Yatabe employs fragmented visual narratives to explore the inherent instability of identity and belonging. Their compositions inhabit an in-between state where familiarity and estrangement coexist, deeply shaped by the complexities of personal and cultural histories. Through the use of blurred forms and faded imagery, Yatabe creates an atmosphere that is both tender and unsettling, holding a quiet tension that suggests the heavy, shifting weight of recollection.

Together, the artists invite the viewer to inhabit the empty space between the tangible and the remembered.