Stretching across painting, video, photography, performance, installation, sculpture, and poetry, Soungui Kim's versatile and experimental practice utilises Eastern and Western culture and philosophy to examine the human experience, definitions of art, and global capitalism.
Read MoreSoungui Kim's early abstract paintings, such as Color Stripes 2 and Colorful Stripe Picture 2 (both 1969), show her key use of primary colours or colour blocks. In a 2019 interview with MisulSegye, she reflected on her Seoul National University mentor, professor Jeong Seong-Wu, whose interest in Korean artistic traditions and primary colours influenced Kim to 'create work in which the colours themselves transcend the rectangle' of the canvas.
In pursuit of artworks that extend beyond the confines of their main medium, Soungui Kim has explored the possibilities of sound. Sori (1970), her graduate work, consisted of dyed clothes hung outside to create an explosion of colours against the urbanscape. Kim titled the work with the word for 'sound' in Korean, noting that sound has no physical boundaries.
Sori later developed into the series 'Situation Plastique' (1971–1975), in which the public was invited to take part in a number of kite-flying happenings. In the video recordings of the events, Soungui Kim charts the process of the work, which include not only the kites' creation but also the sounds and the imagery that the act of flying produced.
Soungui Kim first travelled to France in 1971, and she continues to live and work there now. While teaching at institutions like Ecole Nationale d'Art Décoratif, Nice (1974–1975), and Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Marseille (1974–2000), she interacted with French avantgarde groups such as Supports/Surfaces, and forged friendships with the philosophers Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, whose deconstruction theory aligns with her deconstructive approach to colour, painting, and video art.
In 1975 at the American Center Korea, Seoul, Soungui Kim held her first solo exhibition in Korea. Titled Soungui Kim Art Festival, it presented conceptual artworks and videos alongside discussions about what constitutes art. As she revealed in her interview with MisulSegye, Kim envisioned her exhibition as 'a festival, a memorial service, and an incident', hoping to facilitate conversation among young artists at a time when the definition of art was constricted in Korea.
Throughout the 1980s, Soungui Kim expanded her video art through new discoveries made during her travels. In New York, she became acquainted with pioneering artists of new media art including Nam June Paik, Frank Gillette, Ira Schneider, and Ko Nakajima, some of whom she later invited to exhibit alongside her in Video & Multimedia: KIM Soungui and her invitees (1986) at the Vieille Charité in Marseille. Some of Kim's most iconic video works are from this period, including Vide&O (1989), which shows the artist reading before an installation of a monitor-shaped block of ice, presented at the group exhibition Der Güte Ton Zum Schönen Bild at Kunsthaus Hamburg in the same year.
Soungui Kim is also known for two-dimensional works that explore time, colour, and process. Collages such as Drawing for Il-Hua (One Stroke of Painting) (1979) show the artist's plans for her archery practice targets, later developed into paintings that reference the traditional Korean colour scheme ('Peinture-Cible-Series', 1985–1986). Speaking with Noblesse in 2017, Kim likened her 'One Stroke of Painting' works to her pin-hole photographs—such as the 'Lunes' series' images of the moon (2003–2005)—as they both reflect and capture the passage of time.
Soungui's work has also addressed the effects of global capitalism and technological advancements on society. The radical changes of the modern era are visible in the video works Voie-Voix Lactee (1988), which splices footage of air travel, and Gre-Gre (1997), which was generated from discarded video files. Stock Exchange, initiated in 1997, is an installation that uses data from stock markets and changes form every iteration, reflecting the inescapable reliance on monetary means under capitalism.
In 2019, the Seoul outpost of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) organised Lazy Clouds: the first major Korean retrospective exhibition of Soungui Kim's work. The title comes from Kim's 1998 poem that considers laziness as an incubation space for creativity. The exhibition brought together more than 200 works dating from the late 1960s to the present, including Time Space (2019): a performance in which a robot paints and reads a poem while a shaman performed rituals.
0 time, ARARIO GALLERY | Samcheong, Seoul (2018); 一畵 One Stroke of Painting, ARARIO MUSEUM in Space, Seoul (2016); Lunes, Où, Par-dessus le marché, Silence, Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2014); Beating the market, Slought, Philadelphia (2013); Stock+Garden, Gallery175 Art Museum, Seoul (2008); Points de vue, Galerie de/di/bY, Paris (2005).
Dancing Queen, ARARIO GALLERY | Cheonan (2020); As the Moon Waxes and Wanes: MMCA Gwacheon, 30 Years 1986–2016, MMCA Gwacheon (2016); Memorial Exhibition of Nam June Paik: Nam June Paik ∞ Fluxus, Seoul Museum of Art (2016); The Future is now, La Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille (2015); Infinite challenge, MMCA Seoul (2014); Media City Seoul 2010, Seoul Museum of History (2010).
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2020
