Won Ji Lim is a South Korean artist based in Chicago, working under the name ONEG. Shifting Center (2026) is a participatory installation roughly 9 × 9 × 6 feet, built from metal pipes and connectors into something that reads immediately as a playground jungle gym.
What is suspended inside it does not read as playground at all.
What is in it
The frame carries, among other things:
- Hog casing — sausage skin — woven and stretched through the structure
- A suspended plumb bob hanging inside a hand-woven square
- Woven membranes and transparent pockets
- A converted baseball rebounder carrying a target graphic
- Numbered tags and coloured beads
- A staircase, so the work can be looked at from several heights
Visitors enter the framework and move through its suspended objects, spatial obstacles and rule-based activities. They can throw balls at the target on the rebounder — described in designboom’s coverage as a “physical image of anxiety.” Movement through the piece changes its spatial dynamics, and Lim intends to reconfigure it over time.
The idea doing the work
Lim’s practice, in her own site’s words, examines “hypervigilance, anticipation, and the desire for control.” Shifting Center’s image caption describes it as exploring “hypervigilance and the search for balance.”
The structure translates counting, checking and aligning — the private, repetitive rituals people use to manage anxiety — into a shared physical environment where they become things you do with your body in front of other people. designboom frames the work around the question what does it take to feel secure?
The material choices are where this stops being a metaphor and starts being an argument.
A plumb bob is a tool whose entire purpose is to establish true vertical. It is the instrument of certainty about alignment. Lim hangs it inside a hand-woven square — a frame made by hand, therefore imperfect, therefore an unreliable reference for the perfectly reliable tool suspended in it. The instrument works; what it is measured against does not.
And the hog casing shifts as it dries. That is the detail that organises the whole piece. A material that changes shape over the course of the exhibition means the structure cannot hold still, which means the alignment you achieved on your visit is not the alignment the next person finds. The ritual of checking is defeated not by anyone’s intervention but by the material’s ordinary behaviour. You cannot check something into stability if it is drying.
The numbered tags and counted beads are the counting ritual made external and therefore auditable — and therefore available to be got wrong in public, which is the particular dread the piece is about.
The rebounder
The converted baseball rebounder deserves separate mention because it is the only element that invites unambiguous force. Everything else in the structure asks for care — stepping through, not disturbing, aligning. The rebounder asks you to throw a ball hard at a target, and then returns it to you.
A machine that gives back whatever you throw at it, indefinitely, is a reasonably precise model of a compulsive loop. It is also just fun, which is the thing that makes participatory work about anxiety bearable rather than didactic.
Where you can see it
Nowhere announced, and we are going to be straightforward about that.
The work is listed as 2026–ongoing. Neither designboom’s coverage nor Lim’s own site gives a venue, a city or exhibition dates for Shifting Center, and her CV’s group exhibitions do not name it. We checked both.
Lim is currently an MFA candidate in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2025–present), with a BFA in Ceramics & Glass from Hongik University in Seoul (2020–2025). Her solo exhibition FLOW UN FLOW was at UNBOUND Gallery in Seoul, October–November 2024.
So this is a studio-period work in progress, documented and published, with a stated intention to be reconfigured rather than finished — which is consistent with the piece’s own logic, and which also means there is no date on which you can go and climb through it. A related 2026 work, Something Takes Space, is described as an installation about anxiety and control through everyday objects, without a stated interactive element.
We cover it because the material thinking is unusually tight, not because there is a ticket to buy.
Sources
- metal pipe grid transforms personal rituals of control into participatory playground — designboom
- ONEG — Won Ji Lim’s portfolio
- Won Ji Lim on Instagram