Jae Yong Kim’s ceramic donuts are as much about hunger as they are about art. Egor Sharay meets the sculptor who turned an everyday indulgence into a language of desire. Jae Yong Kim’s work is held in private and museum collections internationally, including the Odunpazarı Modern Museum in Eskişehir, Turkey. His installations have been presented across Asia, the Middle East, and the United States.
I met Jae Yong Kim at Abu Dhabi Art a few years ago, on one of those November afternoons when the fair begins to liquefy at the edges. I had been on my feet for hours, weaving through the white cube grid of gallery booths, nodding through conversations about post-conceptual drawing and the new sincerity, my energy flagging in the cooled, recirculated air. There is a particular hunger that descends at art fairs – a craving that has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with the body’s quiet mutiny against abstraction. I needed something I could understand without effort. Something, if I’m honest, I could almost taste.
Then, around a corner, I saw them: a wall of donuts, glazed and glinting under the spotlights like bonbons in a rue Saint-Honoré pâtisserie. They radiated a kind of Technicolor joy that bypassed the critical faculty entirely. Candy pinks, buttercup yellows, viridian greens flecked with what looked like crushed tourmaline. I laughed aloud – an unfashionable response in a room full of measured expressions – and walked closer, already charmed. Perhaps I was simply famished after a long pilgrimage through the booths and the chatter. Or perhaps I had stumbled, by gastronomic instinct, upon a pure source of happiness disguised as a sculpture stand.
It took me a moment to register that none of these donuts could be eaten. They were ceramic – each one handmade, slick with crystalline glazes that caught the light like a lacquered screen. The discovery didn’t dampen the pleasure; it deepened it. Here was an object that understood hunger even as it refused to satisfy it, that offered joy on a platter and then gently, wittily, asked what you planned to do with it. I stood there a long while, suspended between appetite and admiration, until a tall, softly spoken man with the serene air of someone who has made peace with paradox stepped forward to introduce himself. “I’m Jae Yong Kim,” he said. “Are you hungry, or just looking?”
I bought a coffee – finally, something consumable – and we sat down in a quiet corner of the fair’s café, the kind of temporary refuge where art dealers recharge their phones and their patience. Kim, I quickly learned, possesses that rare quality of someone who has lived in many countries: he listens with his whole posture, a slight forward tilt that suggests genuine curiosity rather than polite reflex. The donuts behind us glowed in their vitrine like a stained-glass window dedicated to some gentle, sugary deity.
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“It started during the 2008 crisis,” he said, when I asked about the origin of this improbable obsession. “I saw my students and young artists wanting to give up. I was questioning my own future, what kind of artist I wanted to become.” He paused, a half-smile surfacing. “And I’ve always had a sweet tooth. Donuts were everywhere in New York – inexpensive, available at any hour, comforting. You could grab one with coffee and keep moving.”
What began as comfort food for a difficult season became something far stranger: a sculptural language. Kim realized the donut was not merely familiar but symbolically charged – “nostalgic but also addictive, temporary, commercial.” It was an object people consumed casually, thoughtlessly, while simultaneously using it to while simultaneously turning to it for comfort and pleasure. He began to see the donut as a mirror of contemporary longing, a ring-shaped void we keep trying to fill. “That changed how I thought about sculpture,” he said. “I wanted to use an object people immediately recognized and connected with emotionally. The donut became a language for talking about desire, dreams, temptation.”
I glanced back at the wall of glazed rings. In the context of an art fair – a marketplace of rarefied desire if ever there was one – the irony felt precise and gentle, like a well-aimed compliment that also happens to be true.
Kim’s relationship to his chosen medium is equally layered. Ceramics occupies an ambiguous position in the art world, still shaking off centuries of being classified as “craft” – a term that in certain circles lands with the soft condescension of “decorative.” Kim doesn’t care. “Clay is to sculpture what drawing is to painting,” he said. “It’s one of the most direct ways to express an idea.” He told me that as the donuts grew larger, he began thinking of them as small paintings, spending weeks developing surfaces that rival the finish of a lacquered Breguet dial. I leaned in later to examine one up close and saw what he meant: the glaze had a depth that pulled the eye inward, crystalline formations blooming like frost on a windowpane, every sprinkle a deliberate gesture.
This attention to surface is all the more remarkable given a fact Kim mentioned almost in passing: he is color-blind. “I was born that way, so it’s normal for me,” he said with a shrug. “Usually when someone asks me what color something is, that’s when I remember.” The confession reframes the entire chromatic enterprise. Kim doesn’t chase accuracy; he pursues relationships, rhythms, “combinations that seem odd at first but work together.” The result is a palette that feels instinctively right while remaining slightly unplaceable – a coral next to a mauve, a chartreuse beside a dusty teal – like hearing a piece of music in a mode you didn’t know existed. It reminded me of the late perfumer Edmond Roudnitska, who spoke of composing not with individual notes but with “forms” of scent. Kim composes with forms of color, and the forms are his alone.
I asked him about the larger installations, those walls of hundreds or even thousands of donuts that transform gallery spaces into environments of almost liturgical intensity. Are they archives or spectacles? “Both,” he said. Each donut, he explained, is tethered to a specific memory – “a visit to the aquarium in Monterey, a walk through the carpet souk, seeing flowers bloom in Central Park.” The works function as a diary, a three-dimensional record of lived experience. “Looking back at older pieces, I can often remember exactly what inspired them, where I was, what I was going through.” Individually they are intimate; collectively, assembled with meticulous attention to color, rhythm, and pattern, they become something else – immersive, symphonic, closer to the experience of stepping inside a Rothko chapel than browsing a pastry counter.
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This interplay between the personal and the spectacular is, I suspect, what elevates the work beyond mere charm. Kim has lived across Korea, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, absorbing visual vocabularies the way some people collect passports. The Blue and White Celadon series emerged after he returned to Korea and felt the split between his Western and Korean identities – a tension rendered in porcelain and cobalt. The Blue and White Celadon series emerged after Kim returned to Korea and began exploring traditional Korean blue-and-white porcelain, a ceramic tradition he had long wanted to study more deeply. Rather than recreating historical works, he incorporated Middle Eastern carpet motifs, folk imagery, and his signature donut forms, creating a visual language that connects different parts of his cultural experience. Middle Eastern patterning, the geometries of Islamic tile work, the saturated hues of a Marrakech market: all of it seeps into the donuts, sometimes consciously, sometimes in ways he only recognizes later. “Every experience eventually becomes material,” he said. “That’s one of the best parts about being an artist.”
For someone whose work is so rooted in physical presence, Kim is refreshingly unsnobbish about the digital afterlife of his creations. The donuts circulate online as images, detached from their weight and texture – a phenomenon he likens to “looking at photos of a Lamborghini versus driving one.” The comparison is not casual; this is Dubai, after all, where the gap between image and experience is a daily negotiation. But he’s grateful that platforms like Instagram allow the work to reach people who may never stand in front of it. He even enjoyed the NFT experiment, where donuts suddenly “could run, jump, sweat – do things physical sculptures couldn’t do.” He remains curious about where technology might lead, but his commitment is ultimately to the object you can touch. “Being able to feel weight, texture, scale, presence – that offers something digital images can’t replicate.”
I asked whether the sheer likability of the work ever felt like a burden. The donuts are irresistible, and in contemporary art, irresistibility is sometimes mistaken for a lack of seriousness – as if pleasure were a suspicious alibi. Kim’s response was characteristically direct. “I never saw accessibility as a weakness. In this climate, with everything happening in the world, people carry a lot of heaviness. I want them to feel joy.” He mentioned titles like Donut Fear, Be Shiny, Be Unique – affirmations glazed onto the work like whispered encouragements. “But behind each piece,” he added, “are years of thought, personal experiences, cultural references. Sometimes I think people notice the leaves on a tree before the roots. The leaves attract attention. The roots support everything underneath.”
That metaphor stayed with me long after we parted. The donut is, by design, all surface – a circle with a hole, a promise of sweetness, a temptation. Kim has taken this most evanescent of forms and made it permanent, handmade, unrepeatable. No two donuts are alike, because no two people are alike. “When hundreds come together,” he said, “they become a community. Each maintains its own identity, but together they form something larger.” It is, I realized, a quiet political vision wrapped in candy-colored glaze.
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Before we said goodbye, I asked what might come next. He spoke of a pull toward something quieter – “maybe something simpler, less drama, more stillness and contemplation.” Kim spoke about wanting to continue exhibiting beyond Asia, particularly in Europe and the Middle East, not simply to expand his audience but to discover how new environments might influence the work itself. Some of the most significant shifts in his practice, he noted, came from exposure to different places and cultures. “I don’t know what the next change will be,” he said. “That’s what interests me.” The donut may not disappear, but it might recede, making room for a different emotional register. He didn’t seem anxious about this. Curiosity, in Kim’s world, is a form of faith.
I walked back through the fair, past booths displaying works that demanded my attention with varying degrees of aggression. The donuts receded behind me, a small galaxy of color still glowing in my peripheral mind. I thought about hunger – the kind that drove Kim to create, the kind that drove me to stop, the kind that no object, however beautiful, can ever quite satisfy. And I thought about that one celadon-blue donut I had briefly considered acquiring, its surface reminiscent of a Goryeo dynasty moon jar I once stood before in a Seoul museum. I didn’t buy it, and I’ve thought about it ever since – which is, of course, exactly the point.
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