The Many Realities of Heecheon Kim
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH KOREA ARTS MANAGEMENT SERVICE

In a 2020 conversation with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Heecheon Kim spoke to a feeling commonly ascribed to the contemporary condition: the world is increasingly becoming 'a moving image'.

Much of Kim's work deals with this overlap between physical and virtual realities. In his 2021 VR installation Ghost (1990), audiences step into the role of powerlifters who avoid looking in the mirror and rely on sensory stimuli to check their posture. The dissonance between body and mind becomes evident, putting into question the nature of the self.

Every Smooth Thing Through Mesher (2018) employed the AR mobile game Pokémon Go as a metaphor for permanent overlays of coded bodies upon physical reality. In Kim's work, Pikachu hides behind a real-life flower pot, which could pass for an ordinary snapshot without the Pokémon. But its memory lingers, collapsing boundaries between the digitally augmented and physical worlds.

Kim's essay-style videos borrow from modern storytelling techniques of video games and animated sequences, such as rapid transitions, fourth wall breaks, and first-person accounts. Rooted in digital culture and personal experiences, they attest to art's gradual acceptance of self-expression using entertainment media.

Kim is among new media artists who deal with the contemporary zeitgeist by amplifying its characteristics.

This was the subject of Gaming Society, a 2023 exhibition at the MMCA, Seoul, that examined the influence of video games on contemporary art and visual culture. Kim showed his video Cutter III (2023), a world of polygons made using video game software.

A self-taught video artist, Kim embraces digital tools to create works that open into a different universe beyond the traditional white cube. Kim himself was initiated into contemporary art in 2012, when he befriended young artists in Argentina and joined artist-run spaces. 'I had a notion that artists were fun people to be around and sought them out,' said Kim, who studied architecture at Korea National University of Arts.

Returning to Seoul in 2013, Kim looked for similar places and discovered Vanjiha, an experimental art space founded by artist Don Sun Pil. 'Vanjiha was, literally, a semi-basement art space,' Kim recalled. 'You had to enter through a window that was barely on ground level.'

There, he met artist Kang Jungsuck, who hosted a film screening event that operated through artist recommendation. Artists showed their work, followed by their references and a discussion moderated by Kang. Kim first watched, learning from others, before showing his own work.

Kang always asked artists: 'Why do you do this?' This introspection has carried into Kim's work, using ever-evolving tools and mediums to investigate perceptual phenomena prompted by technological changes.

In the early single-channel video Wall Rally Drill (2015), Lotte World Tower in Seoul doubles as a metaphor for modernity's gains and losses. Inside the emptied building, Korean flags on the windows signal national pride, while security nets conjure imagery of harsh physical labour that has fuelled the country's rapid economic growth.

Like diary excerpts, Kim's works share feelings and impressions about the world he lives in.

Sleigh Ride Chill (2016) positions viewers amid Seoul's unravelling cityscape, intertwined with frenetic dialogues and animated car races. Stringing fleeting visuals from a first-person perspective, they share the artist's impressions of living in what philosopher Zygmunt Bauman called a liquid modernity, mediated and lived through screens.

In Double Poser, his first solo exhibition in the U.K. at London's Hayward Gallery (1 December 2023–7 January 2024), Kim inquires into this fluid reality in the shifting landscape of contemporary art.

Central to the exhibition is the new commission Double Poser (2023), in which Kim simulates a video game of a character skateboarding outside Hayward Gallery. Off-screen, Kim's friends tease the artist that he does not actually skateboard, extending the reproach to the questionable presence of his work in London. Written instructions reveal that his objective is to infiltrate the gallery as a mole without being discovered.

A photograph of a dead bird resting in a human palm interjects the video, followed by an antagonist murdering Kim's character without warning. The mission appears to have failed despite the artist's apparent success in having an exhibition at the gallery.

Like diary excerpts, Kim's works share feelings and impressions about the world he lives in. Viewers find moments of recognition—in a video game setting or banter between friends—amid loose narrative structures, long-winded scenes, and attention-grabbing effects.

Steps away from Double Poser, the video installation Deep in the Forking Tanks (2019) compares the experience of living in a digitally-mediated world with the disorientation of a diver inside a sensory deprivation tank. Intercepted with scenes of the artist taking selfies with a filter, the diver is caught between a recorded simulation of his training inside the tank and his actual experience. He attempts to escape, only to sink deeper.

Kim is among new media artists who deal with the contemporary zeitgeist by amplifying its characteristics. Using the same mediums and tools that have created new ways to engage and escape the world, Kim explores the shifting faces of reality, at once immersed and observant. —[O]