Seungmin Yi: Imperishables

All’Bout Clay Gallery

247 West 36th Street, NYC

July 25th, 2026 - August 22nd, 2026

10 am to 10 pm, Mon to Sun

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BIO

Seungmin Yi is a South Korean ceramicist based in New York City. 

Yi received her BS in Finance and Computing & Data Science, with a minor in Food Studies, from New York University in 2019. She began working in clay in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, finding in ceramics both a return to community and a reconnection with her Korean heritage.

Her first solo exhibition, Imperishables, presented at All'bout Clay, New York City (2026), asks what remains once the perishable has left the table. Yi will begin her MBA at MIT Sloan in 2026, where she plans to continue her ceramic practice in Boston.

Artist Statement

Seungmin Yi explores the temporality of produce: its ripening, decaying, and transformation across the seasons, through her ceramic practice. Her work draws on her Korean roots, a nation shaped by hardship and scarcity that learned to cherish, preserve, and honor each ingredient, most notably through techniques of fermentation.

In clay, Yi finds her own form of preservation. Where fermentation extends the life of food by transforming it, her ceramics fix a fleeting moment, the blush of an apple, the freckles of an egg, into permanence. Most of her works begin on the wheel, then push outward into explorations of the textures, colors, and irregularities of produce, embracing surfaces that appear bruised, cracked, or mid-transformation.

"Food has often been the language that bridged what words could not," Yi says. "To cook for someone is one of the most honest forms of care. You spend hours over something meant to be eaten, to disappear, and you offer it anyway, because the point was never to keep it." Ceramics asks the same of her: hours at the wheel, in glaze and in fire, spent shaping something whose purpose is to be held, used, and shared with intention, a quiet way of considering someone else before they ever hold it. For Yi, a bowl carries the same devotion as a meal, effort poured in not to keep, but to pass into someone else's hands.

Yi began working in clay in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, when the practice offered both community and a way back to her Korean heritage. Imperishables, her first solo exhibition (All'bout Clay, New York, 2026), takes its name from that same question: once something perishable is eaten, spoiled, or cleared from the table, what is left behind? Yi's answer sits in clay, holding the shape of something that was never meant to last.