Artsonje Center is pleased to host Sung Hwan Kim’s solo exhibition. Kim simultaneously takes on diverse roles of director, editor, performer, composer, narrator, and poet, thus presenting an artistic form that integrates performance, video, and installation. This experimental format relates to the stories that the artist has borrowed from various contexts such as his personal life and episodes, rumors, history, and legend, seeming real and at the same time creating a visual narrative as poetic as a dream.

This solo exhibition at Artsonje Center is a concise presentation of Kim’s art, one that systematically integrates and reconstructs video, drawing, installation, and performance in a single exhibition space. Kim was selected as the first commissioned artist for the opening exhibition of The Tanks at Tate Modern, an exhibition space that opened in July of 2012 as the world’s very first film and performance gallery. Temper Clay (2012), the work commissioned for that occasion, will be presented to the Korean public for the first time. Having appropriated the title from a verse in Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, Temper Clay repeatedly uses the images of paper and fire to magically convey a woman’s life. This solo exhibition also presents other video works such as Manahatas Dance and A-DA-DA.

This exhibition will serve as an opportunity to see not only the unique intersection of Korean and personal narratives through Kim’s art that is referred to as “visual literature”, but also the elaborate structure of an experimental art that transcends diverse genres. It is especially noteworthy that Kim constructs the gallery as an experimental and open space that he will also use as the actual stage for his new performance to be shown at the museum. To accompany the exhibition, a catalogue with the artist’s drawings and texts by five writers including Sung Hwan Kim and Stephen Greenblatt, professor of comparative literature at Harvard University, will be published.

About the Artist
Sung Hwan Kim was born in Seoul in 1975 and is currently based in New York. Kim studied architecture at Seoul National University and went on to Williams College where he majored in mathematics and art. He then finished his MA program in visual studies at MIT and participated in the residency program of Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. Kim simultaneously takes on diverse roles of director, editor, performer, composer, narrator, and poet, thus presenting an artistic form that integrates performance, video, and installation. In 2007, he won the Hermès Korea art prize for his Summer Days in Keijo – Records of 1937. He has held solo exhibitions at various venues including de Appel (2007, Amsterdam), Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art (2008, Rotterdam), Haus der Kunst (2010, Munich), Kunsthalle Basel (2011, Basel), Queens Museum (2011, New York), and The Tanks at Tate Modern (2012, London).

*image (left)
Sung Hwan Kim,
Temper Clay, 2012, Video
Courtesy of Artist and Wilkinson Gallery
©2012 Sung Hwan Kim