Characterised by layers of fragmented scenes and the use of multiple languages, Sung Hwan Kim's video installations activate histories embedded within sites and objects that often hold personal significance.
Read MoreSince the early 2000s, Kim has collaborated with musician David Michael DiGregorio (also known as dogr) to create multimedia installations that encompass video, sound, performance, drawings, texts, and lyrics. Kim draws from a diverse range of sources, including folklore, politics, and national and personal histories.
Two sites recur throughout Kim's videos: the Hyundai apartment complex in Apkujung-dong, Seoul, where the artist grew up in the 1970s and 80s, and his parents' rural home in Pocheon. Architectural elements may serve as entry points into specific narratives of Kim's works, such as in From the commanding heights... (2007), a video based on a rumour from Kim's childhood that a former South Korean president had visited his actress mistress in her apartment.
Kim's longstanding interests include the human body, from its verbal and physical languages to its relationship with social, cultural, and natural environments. In the short video Dog Video (2006), DiGregorio plays a composite character of a younger version of the artist and the artist's childhood dog, while Kim assumes the role of his father. Their performance interrogates communication and boundaries, in relation to the artist's own familial experiences.
Dog Video belongs to 'in the room', a series of videos and performances Kim began during his time in Amsterdam, where he was a fellow at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende in 2004–2005. The series developed out of Kim's experience of living with another person, and learning to share spaces and languages.
Kim explores translation and cultural memory in Washing Brain and Corn (2010), a video installation that was first commissioned by Media City Seoul and has since grown to include a radio play and text. In the video, a young girl (played by Kim's niece) retells the story of Lee Seung-bok, a boy murdered by North Koreans in 1968 for proclaiming his dislike for communists. Crude drawings on transparent film are seem to overlap the video. The story of Lee, once taught in South Korean schools, is today an obsolete tale for younger generations of Koreans—relegated almost to the status of folklore. Kim's niece, who is a second-generation Korean American, recites it in English, further distancing the story from its history.
In 2012, Kim was the inaugural artist to present work in Tate Modern's new permanent gallery space, The Tanks. Among the works on view was the video installation Temper Clay (2012), an adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy King Lear, filmed largely in black-and-white. Temper Clay comprises scenes of choreographed performance intersecting with daily activities, with the settings of the Seoul Hyundai apartment complex and Kim's family's home featuring throughout. The film explores ideas of domesticity, land, and class in Korea.
The complexities of history and knowledge are central concepts of many of Kim's works. The video installation Love before Bond (2017), for example, revolves around Kim's Korean American niece and a young man of colour as they perform certain gestures and postures associated with class or ethnicity. Suggested in their interactions is the historic and present-day racial inequality in the U.S., and the relationship between two marginalised identities.
In Hair is a piece of head (2021), Kim places two seemingly irrelevant timelines in conversation: the May 18 Democratisation Movement in Gwangju of 1980, and the lesser-known history of Korean immigrant workers in Hawaiʻi in the early 1900s. Kim poses questions around intercultural, regional, and generational relationships, and considers language as a site of struggle as well as insight. He asks, 'Why should one care, and how does one really care about the trouble beyond a national border, let alone the border of one's skin?'
Sung Hwan Kim has presented his work in solo and group exhibitions internationally.
Solo exhibitions include Night Crazing, Barakat Contemporary, Seoul (2022); Temper Clay, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021); And who has not dreamed of violence?, daadgalerie, Berlin (2018); Life of Always a Mirror, Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2014); From the Commanding Heights...*, Queens Museum, New York (2011).
Group exhibitions include Hawaiʻi Triennial, Honolulu (2022); The 13th Gwangju Biennale (2021); Reenacting History: Collective Actions and Everyday Gestures, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon (2017); VIVA ARTE VIVA, 57th Venice Biennale (2017); The People's Cinema, Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (2016).
Sung Hwan Kim's website can be found here, and Kim's Instagram can be found here.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2022
