Jun Beom Kim, and the two sentences everything here comes from.
The first sentence is that modern life piles stress on people through their screens, and somebody should hand them a way out that is not another app telling them off. The second is that human rights are not a topic; they are a set of people, and some of them are eighteen with a baby and no school to go back to.
I have been building against both since I was in middle school, mostly badly at first. The pattern only became visible to me in hindsight: every piece of art I finished was trying to slow somebody down, and every brand I started was trying to pay for someone. Once I saw it I stopped treating them as separate.
The art came first because it was the thing I could not stop doing. I paint, I sketch, and I build in Blender, and the subjects keep circling the same territory — phone addiction, climate, the difference between rest and collapse. The business came second, out of impatience: a painting can change how a person feels in a gallery, but a brand can move money every month.
Then Girls Be Strong took me to Kampala, and the two halves stopped being a theory. I taught art to small children at a learning centre, sat in a vocational school with women my mother's age and women barely older than me, and came home knowing exactly what the percentage on my products was for. That is what I want to keep doing, and it is why I am applying to study art management and business rather than one or the other.
Facts
- Name
- Jun Beom Kim (김준범)
- Also known as
- Jayden Kim
- Date of birth
- 2 July 2008
- Gender
- Male
- Based in
- Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea
- Phone
- +82 10 8981 5230
- Intended field
- Art management, business
Education
- British Columbia Collegiate — SeoulInternational school. I entered the Genius Olympiad art category as a tenth-grader here, and the presentation I wrote for it is on this site in full.
What I have been doing
- Founder — KikobanaA running brand for women in their twenties and thirties, built on slow running as mental-health practice. Five per cent of revenue is committed to the education and independence of single mothers in Uganda.
- Founder — KKUMULA hand-lettering stationery and fancy-goods brand. Postcards and paper goods carrying handwriting that is unpolished on purpose.
- Founder — BerrapyA character brand about two blueberry brothers who run at different speeds. Berry plus therapy.
- Girls Be Strong — student non-profitSupport for single mothers and their children. Field work in Kampala, Uganda, and the organisation's rebranding.
- Intern — Expo 2025 OsakaTen days on site: visitor guidance, crowd flow, translation support.
What I work with
- Blender
- Watercolour
- Coloured pencil
- Pencil sketching
- Hand lettering
- Character design
- Brand identity
- Goods & product design
- App product design
What I want to study, and why both
Art management, because the part of the art world I find most interesting is not the studio — it is the decision about what gets shown, to whom, and who pays for it. Ice Auction taught me that: the painting only did its work because I stood in front of a room and explained it.
Business, because a brand is the most durable way I have found to keep a promise. Five per cent of Kikobana is not a donation drive that runs out of enthusiasm; it is a line in the cost of goods. I want to be much better at building things that survive my own attention span.
See the work