Sung Hwan Kim

2008 WITTE DE WITH, CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART EXHIBITION

Sept 13 to Oct 26, 2008

In his practice, Sung Hwan Kim integrates video and performance art, taking on the role of director, editor, performer, composer, narrator and poet. By approaching his own work from all production angles, his pieces are infused with his own highly subjective vision.

His videos and performances seldom tell a linear story. His dream-like films depart from a straight-forward story, the scenes shift almost illogically with strong cuts, whilst maintaining an overall narrative and aesthetic coherence.

The In the Room series was created during Kim’s residence in Amsterdam and was partly produced for his participation in the Prix de Rome. The series offers insight into some of Kim’s working methods. As the title indicates, he mixes scenes and stories taken from his immediate environment. To Kim, every situation offers useful material and he does not search for certain props or characters, but works with what surrounds him. He “collects” his environment through the materials, objects and the people he encounters, combining all these elements in his films.

In the videos Dog Video (2006) and From the Commanding Heights… (2007), Kim creates bizarre stories mixing them with quotidian events, gossip and history, so that the account feels unreal yet entirely believable. For this exhibition, From the Commanding Heights… will be expanded into an installation including Dog Video, along with a wall drawing of chimerical images, provoked by the textual elements of the video. Parts of this drawing are from the live drawings that Kim made during his performance Pushing against the air, performed for Prix de Rome.

Summer Days in Keijo – written in 1937 (2007) is a fictional documentary about the modernisation of Seoul, which was previously called Keijo under Japanese colonial rule. The 1937 travel log “In Korean Wilds and Villages” by the Swedish ethnographer and zoologist Sten Bergman forms the guide to the film. Kim traces Bergman’s footsteps in present-day Seoul, following a Dutch female protagonist through the streets and buildings of the city. The film focuses on architecture that has been moved around in the course of time, therefore ironically losing its status as a landmark, and revealing that even supposedly constant constituents of a city can be malleable. Kim created an elaborate soundtrack to the film in collaboration with the Amsterdam and New York-based musician David Michael DiGregorio also known as dogr. The soundtrack creates a tension between the descriptive narration and a pondering voice that resonates and repeats the assumptions made by the female protagonist.

Curated by: Eva Huttenlauch, Nicolaus Schafhausen

Artist: Sung Hwan Kim
(born 1975 in Korea) lives and works in New York. He graduated from MIT, Cambridge, USA with a Master of Science in Visual Studies in 2003. Solo exhibitions, performances and screenings include: From the Commanding Heights…, Wilkinson Gallery, London (2008); In the Room (with David Michael DiGregorio), Project Arts Center, Dublin (2007); Sung Hwan Kim, Michaelis Gallery, Cape Town (2006); In the Room 2 (with David Michael DiGregorio), Huis aan de Werf, Utrecht, performance (2006); In the Room 3 (with David Michael DiGregorio), STEIM, Amsterdam, performance (2006); An imaginary Relationship with Ourselves, curated by Cinema Project, co-presented by Portland Institute of Contemporary Art / TBA Festival and Northwest Film Center, USA (2005); Him/Her and the Third Gender, D.U.M.B.O. Film Festival, Brooklyn, USA (2004); A-DA-DADA, Total Museum, Seoul, Korea (2003).

Sung Hwan Kim

A book was published by the end of 2008, including a conversation with Sung Hwan Kim and Joan Jonas and a contribution of the artist himself about his In the Room series.

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