Asia

Sung Hwan Kim

Untitled

2010

Untitled, 2010

This untitled drawing was part of Sung Hwan Kim’s solo exhibition Sung Hwan Kim: A Still Window From Two or More Places, which took place in tranzitdisplay in Prague, Czech Republic in 2010. tranzit.cz is part of a network working independently in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovak Republic, and Romania since 2002. Such doodle-like drawings are often crucial components of Kim’s performances. The imagery of faces, heads, snakes, and serpentine paths are recurring motifs in the artist’s drawing practice. The resulting images can often be interpreted in various ways, such as in this composition depicting heads stacked on top of other heads; or heads that grow vertically; or snakes that conjoin heads with other sets of this composite human/animal figuration. Kim draws these images many times and iteratively in different contexts. The emphasis is not on translation or representation, but concurrency, which is made possible by allowing different faculties in understanding between different modes of expression and experience. The artist explains that in such drawings, meaning is compounded by different modes of temporality: film time, story time, and performance time.

In his practice, Sung Hwan Kim assumes the role of director, editor, performer, composer, narrator, and poet. Working with video and performance art, Kim assembles encounters, sounds, sculptures, and images inspired by his alternating homes in Seoul, Amsterdam, and New York. Bringing together Korean culture, the history of performance and film, and inspiration from pioneering artists such as Joan Jonas, Kim’s practice is a robust and complex mode of visual story-telling. Engaging with Korea’s history, modernity, architecture, and social structures, as well as notions of urbanity, domesticity, and matriarchy, Kim merges narrative and documentary forms. The artist often interweaves real footage and interviews from a variety of sources with more poetic sequences of text or choreography. Sound and musical compositions are significant elements in many of Kim’s video works; the soundtracks are often developed by the artist’s frequent collaborator, the musician David Michael DiGregorio, also known as dogr.

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Sung Hwan Kim Untitled

Sung Hwan Kim

Untitled