UNDER THE HANGING WIRES
BY MINA KIM
When I walked out of the recent retrospective of Ruth Asawa at the Museum of Modern Art, I found myself thinking not first about the museum, but about my mother's kitchen.
When I was young, my mother saved and repaired almost everything in our home. If the wire mesh fruit basket in the kitchen tore, she would mend it with bread ties and continue using it for years. Whenever a package arrived, she saved the strings, later weaving them into small baskets to hold miscellaneous objects. At the time, I found these gestures embarrassing-old-fashioned, even miserly. It seemed like a refusal to move forward, a reluctance to replace what was worn out.
Only much later did I begin to see those actions differently. My mother had given up a promising career to stay home and raise my sister and I. Within the confines of domestic life, repairing and weaving with whatever materials were available may have been her most accessible form of creative expression. What I once perceived as frugality now feels like invention under constraint-a quiet insistence on making.
I first encountered Ruth Asawa's work years ago, only in passing images. At the time, I registered them simply as suspended wire forms casting beautiful shadows. I did not remember her name. I saw them, if I am honest, as decorative-almost craft-like objects hanging elegantly in space.
Install view: Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective at Museum of Modern Art
It was only after I returned to art more seriously that I learned her name, and only at MoMA's exhibition that I understood the depth of her background: her experience as a Japanese American, her incarceration during World War II, the resilience that shaped her practice and her commitment to education and community. Seen in that context, the sculptures no longer read as merely graceful forms. They felt like structures grown out of endurance.
Standing beneath the hanging wire sculptures, I did not experience them as static objects but as accumulations of time. Each loop of wire seemed to carry the memory of a hand repeating the same gesture over and over. The forms were open yet self-supporting, porous yet resilient. Interior and exterior dissolved into one another. They held space without enclosing it completely.
In that moment, I recognized something deeply familiar: the repeated looping of wire echoed my mother's hands tying and re-tying bread ties around a torn basket. What I once dismissed as small and domestic revealed itself as a profound act of persistence. Perhaps what was missing was not artistic intention, but institutional recognition.
This retrospective did more than honor an artist's legacy. It reframed the meaning of repetitive, modest labor-especially labor performed within constraint. It allowed me to reconsider my own history, and to see that what I once misunderstood as scarcity might also have been ingenuity.
I left the exhibition feeling grateful-not only to the museum for staging the retrospective, but to Ruth Asawa for giving form and visibility to a kind of making that often goes unnamed. Through her work, I was able to recognize that quiet acts of repair, repetition, and care can carry extraordinary strength.
