Taeyoon Kim Expands Time and Space

Whether playing on an infinite loop, disrupting synchronicity, or following a rhythm, Taeyoon Kim explores the expansion of time and space through digital media and the moving image.

Taeyoon Kim's solo exhibition Oblique Afternoons at Whistle, Seoul (19 August–1 October 2022), consists of new video-based installations, drawings, and a sound piece.

Resonating through the gallery space is Oblique Afternoons (2022), a sound work made up of collaged recordings from Kim's daily life that range from the sound of birds chirping to heavy rain, and a succession of digital alarms.

Enlarged, abstracted, or distorted urban and natural landscapes are made to feel somewhat unsettling when paired with argumentative male voices, but the same scenes may feel contemplative when engulfed in the sound of wind.

These quotidian noises interfere with the rhythm of Indirect Hours (2022), a two-channel video installation comprising footage taken by the artist of his urban and natural surroundings. At one point, the screens display a close-up of the surface of water and a white car side-by-side.

There's an element of contingency that feeds into how the audio-visual elements that compose these two works interact with one another.

The titles of these works, Oblique Afternoons and Indirect Hours, suggest a conception of time that deviates from the traditional linearity: an idea that persists throughout Kim's work.

Since studying live action at California Institute of the Arts and film at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 2000s, the artist has developed a practice that confounds the boundaries of linear narrative, of beginnings and endings.

It is therefore no surprise that many of Kim's video works engage with patterns and repetition.

Steady Griffins (2014), the five-channel installation included in the artist's 2016 solo exhibition at Media Art Asia Pacific (MAAP) in Shanghai, for example, was set to loop in a random order, disrupting the playback cycle to establish new rhythms each time a sequence reached its end.

But as much as time is rendered ambiguous in Kim's works, so is the image. What appears as pulsating fields of colour in Steady Griffins is actually streamed iPhone footage of the animated television series Family Guy, shot by laying a second iPhone directly onto the first, resulting in the extreme blurring of the original cartoon.

Kim further explored the idea of asynchronous time and space in Drop (2016), a ten-channel video installation exhibited at his solo show, Blinded Coincidence, at Seoul's ONE AND J. Gallery in 2016, and at Art Basel Hong Kong in the following year.

Each channel depicts an undefined blue screen which remains blank until a tiny white ball drops into view. The movement of the ball—which 'bounces' off the screen's edge, comes to a halt, or disappears off-screen—follows a distinct rhythm across each channel, creating delay in the experience of perceiving what appear to be identical screens.

In Blinded Coincidence, Kim's sculptures worked to further reinforce the spatial discord seen in Drop. Monitors were arranged in isolation or in stacks of two or three, and positioned at different angles to expand the space within and outside of the screens.

Assorted sculptures placed atop and around the monitors—such as Sunday Yellow, a triangular mass of epoxy resin and paper clay, or the lumpy oval-shaped plaster and oil stick form Green Thumb (both 2016)—compelled the viewer to meander through the works, never quite able to see all ten screens simultaneously within the space.

Time and space also continue indefinitely in Temporary Angles (2022), a tower of six CRT monitors tucked into a corner of Oblique Afternoons at Whistle. Made using computer-generated algorithms, the videos display distorted, mirrored grids that continually move towards their respective centres, where they converge and reproduce.

While the image perpetually disappears in video works like these, Kim's drawings attempt to capture their after-images. Decaying Undertones (2022), a coloured pencil drawing on Bristol paper, depicts overlapping waves of dark blue and cyan against a pale yellow background, and might be viewed as a screenshot of Kim's video works. The irregularity of the patterns is suggestive of the oblique nature of time, and its resulting imprints.—[O]