Sim Raejung's animations are populated by animal and hybrid anthropomorphic characters that engage in often violent and unethical actions. Implicit in Sim's fragmented, dark yet humorous narratives are an intense fascination with the human body and mind, their corporeal and internal desires, compulsions, and anxieties.
Read MoreSim received her BFA (2008) and MFA (2010) from Seoul National University of Science and Technology.
Sim works mostly by hand, using a lightbox to spontaneously create drawings for her animations. The rough and textured quality of her drawings is the result of pen nibs and ink, the kind that manga artists often use, while she also alternates between paint markers and paint brushes.
Sim favours black and white, a feature that the artist has said enables her to work quickly. Paintings in her solo exhibition Drowsy-head at ARARIO GALLERY, Seoul, in 2023, by contrast saw Sim expand her palette to include more colours, employing bright pink, orange, yellow and blue acrylic ink on canvas.
Violence and social taboos are frequent features of Sim's animations, through which she explores the obsessions and compulsions of humankind. In her two-channel video Noise between floors (2012), for example, a family moves into an apartment. Their neighbour, irritated by the noises they make, releases a deadly insect to obliterate them; what he miscalculates, or overlooks out of anger, is that the insect does not distinguish between its targets and ends up killing him as well.
Though extreme in its protagonist's quick turn to violence, Noise between floors sharply captures the 'noisy neighbours' phenomenon that plagued South Korea around the same time as Sim made the animation, which escalated to real-life violence and, in some cases, murder between neighbours.
'Cannibal Kingdom' (2018–2021) revolves around cannibalism, considering both its vilification as a taboo and its history as a cultural phenomenon in some parts of the world. The series expands into fictional worlds, such as the use of psychometry to solve cold cases in Psychic Detectives (2018) or the use of human tears, extracted from eyes petrified with fear, for cooking in 겁에 질린 눈물은 짠 맛이다 (2021).
Unlike many of Sim's works, which begin from selected drawings, B-301 was inspired by a single location—an underground storage space in the villa that she lives in. One day, the artist entered the room and began to think that it resembled an operating room.
Presented in Sim's solo exhibition by the same title at ARARIO MUSEUM in SPACE, Seoul, in 2019, B-301 consists of multi-channel video installations that show an unspecified laboratory. In one video, black curtains snap open and closed like camera shutters, allowing brief peeks into a room in which fragmented body parts and two heads adjoined at the neck lay strewn across a table. In another, a humanoid figure is shown sewing the heads together.
Sim Raejung's work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include: Drowsy-head, ARARIO GALLERY, Seoul (2023); B-301, ARARIO MUSEUM in SPACE, Seoul (2019); Cannibal Kingdom, Art Space Hue, Paju (2016).
Group exhibitions include: The 21st Songeun Art Award Exhibition, Songeun Art Space, Seoul (2021); The 13th Hesitation, ARARIO GALLERY, Cheonan (2021); Love in the Covid 19 era, PLACEMAK3, Seoul (2020) NOTHING, Kyobo Art Space, Seoul (2019); 美親狂場, Culture Station Seoul 284, Seoul (2015).
In 2023, Sim Raejung was announced as one of 13 artists chosen for the Korean Artists Abroad programme supported by Korea Arts Management Service.
Sim Raejung's Instagram can be found here.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2023
