Artsonje Center is pleased to announce Lune, Ou, par-dessus le marche, Silence, a solo exhibition by Kim Soun Gui, a video artist who has lived and worked in France since 1971. After Stock Exchange in 2000, this is the artist's second solo exhibition at Artsonje Center. Included in the show are video recordings of interviews with distinguished French philosophers and performances by a renowned composer. Also included in the show are the “begue calligraphie” series and the “photographie idiot” series. In addition, two major events will take place in conjunction with the exhibition. The first is a conference on 20 May, 2014, and the other is the release of selected video works on DVD.

Since the 1970s, Kim’s work has involved in-depth exchanges with internationally renowned artists and philosophers; John Cage-Empty Words & Mirage Verbal (1986) comprises two separate video recordings of the American composer John Cage (1912-1992) performing Empty Words and Mirage Verbal at the festival “Video & Multimedia/Kim Soun Gui & Her Guests,” held at La Vieilles Charite, Marseille. In these performances, the famous composer reads and sings the words of Henry David Thoreau and Marcel Duchamp that he has selected following the rules indicated in Book of Change.

From the 1990s on, major themes in Kim’s work has been her concern with the direction of contemporary art in the increasingly globalized world, and specifically the relationship between art and the art market. In the 2000s, Kim has explored “silence” and “chaos,” investigations with intellectual roots in Eastern philosophical thought. These explorations are deepened in her interview with Jean-Luc Nancy (b. 1940) and Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). In Conversation with Nancy (2002), Kim and Nancy discuss the absence of content in contemporary art. They also discuss in depth where Eastern and Western philosophies might meet and where they might separate. In Conversation with Derrida (2002), Kim ruminates on Deconstructionist premises from the perspective of Eastern thought and shows her investigation on the “art of silence” as an act of resistance against globalization.

Other works included in the exhibition are Ice Video Concert: Vide & O (1989), Lunes (2003); and AIE-JOU-AIE-JOU (2013). While Lunes is a series of photographs taken with a pinhole camera that the artist built herself, AIE-JOU-AIE-JOU presents moving images that conceived randomly by a computer program. These images are then combined, also arbitrarily, with images of Lee Aeju, a friend of artist, a choreographer, dancer, pedagogue of Korean traditional dance and the Korean government-designated “intangible cultural asset” for a Buddhist dance, Seungmu.

About the artist
Kim Soun Gui completed undergraduate and graduate studies in art at Seoul National University and went to France in 1971 on a scholarship from the French government. Since then, she has lived and worked there as an artist. She has held professorships at the Ecole Nationale d’Art Decoratif de Nice (1974-75), the Ecole Superieure des Beaux-Arts de Marseille (1974-2000), and the Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Art de Dijon (2001-2011). She showed her first video work in 1973, and since then she has been working in diverse media that include installation, multimedia art, performance, and photography. She is deeply influenced by Buddhist thought, the philosophies of Lao-tse and Tchuang-tse, and Wittgenstein’s investigation on language. Through her works, she explores the nature of time and the play of language, and questions of life and art. She has held solo and group exhibitions in numerous venues including Gwangu Biennale; the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea; Artsonje Center in Seoul; the Austrian Museum of Modern Art; Ars Aevi, a Museum of Contemporary Art in Sarajevo, Bosnia; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris; the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice; and the San Diego Museum of Art in California. Most recently, she held a solo exhibition, Beating the Market, at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Kim is also the author of numerous papers, articles, and books, the last of which include Nuages Paresseux (Lazy Clouds) (1999) and Montagne, C’est la Mer/Tchoung-Tseu & Wittgenstein (Mountain, It’s the Sea/ Tchuang-tse & Wittgenstein) (2003).

*image (left)
Kim Soun Gui,
Lunes, 2003,
C-print, 12 Photographs, 83x60cm
courtesy of the artist