Sung Hwan Kim
17 April - 29 May 2011
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| © Sung Hwan Kim
Washing Brain and Corn, 2010
Video still
Courtesy the artist |
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SUNG HWAN KIM
Line Wall
17 April – 29 May 2011
Kunsthalle Basel is pleased to announce "Line Wall”, the first
comprehensive solo exhibition by the Korean artist Sung Hwan Kim (*1975,
Seoul) in Switzerland. Kim turned the Kunsthalle’s upper gallery into a
semi-dark space filled with wall drawings and existing video works
installed within an elaborate architectural framing, including
carpeting, fields of black paint on walls, self-designed lamps and
streamers.
Access to the exhibition is through a modified entrance, where an
inclining passageway reduces the neoclassical gallery’s high doors to
human scale. The primary source of Kim’s poetic and inherently topical
film works, drawings and performances is the corporal and spiritual
relationship of a person to his or her surroundings—to other people,
language, architecture, the state or historical events. Growing up in
South Korea in the 1980s, Kim initially studied architecture in Seoul
before immigrating to the US, where he subsequently studied mathematics
and art (with, among others, American artist Joan Jonas) at MIT in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kim was a resident at the Rijksakademie in
Amsterdam in 2004 and 2005, before moving in 2009 to New York, where he
continues to live.
In his work, Kim manipulates various textures and transparencies in
order to probe what it means to be from somewhere at all, and not from a
particular place, be it East Asia or the USA. His films and
performances are enigmatic and myth-like; rather than linear narratives,
the forms his works take are more reminiscent of song structures. The
genre of song is found in every culture, and is regarded as the primal
form of poetry. Accordingly, lyrical characteristics like repetition,
rhythm, transformation and the superimposition of motifs find a place in
all of Kim’s works. For the past five years, he has been collaborating
with musician and singer David Michael DiGregorio (aka dogr), whose
music combines archaic chant forms with contemporary pop influences.
DiGregorio’s spherical sound and haunting vocals are primary elements of
Kim’s films and performances, which, in their intensity and through the
use of elements such as masks and other symbolically charged objects,
recall ritual actions. Kim’s works, however, also relate to the
tradition of more contemporary performance and theatre art.
By means of black and grey carpeting, as well as darkly painted walls
and occasional touches of colour, Kim has created an environment within
the Kunsthalle that could be described as an echo chamber—an echo
chamber for the wall drawings and the three existing film works that are
being presented here jointly for the first time, and also for the
multiple layers of narratives, images and sounds that overlap each
other, merging into a completely immersive environment that viewers can
experience individually in the installation’s intimate setting. In
addition, taut wire is strung across the space like the strings of an
instrument, creating both a compositional element as well as a
(potential) source of sound.
At the entrance of the large gallery is situated Drawing Video (2008),
which combines Kim’s different working methods in an exemplary way. The
work is a compilation of three stagings of the 2007 performance Pushing
against the air, which formed part of the "In the Room” series that Kim
and DiGregorio developed between 2006 and 2009. In one part of the
performance, Kim conducted a conversation with DiGregorio and Byungjun
Kwon while simultaneously drawing on tracing paper, an action that was
recorded on video. In this analogue, real-time animation, Kim creates
surreal schematic figures—a woman whose heart is located in her throat
rather than her chest, a man with many dots on his face—by employing a
method similar to automatic writing. This "live drawing” not only evokes
the relationship we have with our own bodies, but also a larger and
more general feeling of otherness.
Ungbyeon and guyeondonghwa were two forms of narrative that were
sometimes taught at South Korean schools during the Cold War in order to
improve the students’ speaking skills. While the first focused on
speaking in public and was mainly taught to boys, the second
incorporated gestural speech and body language and was intended for
girls. Washing Brain and Corn (2010), the central work in the
Kunsthalle’s large gallery, refers to a story from 1968 that was
popularized by these narrative forms. It concerns a boy whose mouth was
ripped open by North Korean spies after he told them "Nan kongsan tang
ee sil eu yo", or: "I hate the communists”. Utilizing simple analogue
means, Kim generates highly intense, dreamlike video images that address
dated anticommunist propaganda in the context of armistice: a military
assault is reenacted as a short-lived tableau vivant, an old Korean
machine to make "kang naeng ee” (popcorn) evokes associations with a
military canon. In another sequence, Kim uses an overhead projector to
draw on the face of his niece while filming her, a young Korean raised
in the US whose relationship to the story of the boy is purely
fictitious.
The materiality of surface—the very skin of things—plays a special role
within Kim’s work. While the Kunsthalle’s walls are covered in chalk
drawings, semitransparent fabrics and reflections are utilized as a
means of conjuring symbolic images. Moreover, the camera lens itself
becomes not only an observer but, via tracing paper, also an image
support—and, in this, a kind of canvas. Likewise, Kim works with
different textures in the two rear galleries as well, both of which are
again accessible by an entrance (in this case equipped with an
integrated halfway mirror) that has been reduced in size. The first
gallery is completely covered with black carpet; the further, smaller
space contains an arrangement of various layers of fabric with a
table—set with a green-painted guitar and a cobbler’s stand—positioned
behind them. In addition to a blue mosquito net (common to Korea) draped
over the windowpane to form a crestlike emblem, Kim also uses the white
synthetic material employed in the garden of the Kunsthalle, where it
serves as cover for the temporary building site located there.
Manahatas Dance (2009), the video work from which the installations in
both spaces derive their names, centres on the urban development of
Manhattan, as well as New York’s status as a city of immigrants and a
location of desire. The film was made in 2009, the year that Kim turned
33 and moved to New York. It was also the year of the American
presidential elections that brought Barack Hussein Obama—an embodiment,
then, of hope and change—to the White House. In Kim’s work, Manhattan’s
regulated public space becomes a stage for a series of performances
narrating an idiosyncratic and individual story. Manahatas Dance is a
filmic essay about heimat and dislocation, the dream of better living
conditions and the search for a space that can be created and adapted
individually.
One week before the opening of "Line Wall”, a private presentation
entitled a short presentation of several moments (or Habeas Corpus) by
Kim, DiGregorio and their collaborator Lisa Lightbody took place in the
Kunsthalle. In the piece, Lightbody sat on an elevation in the corner of
the gallery (which is now used for one of the speakers) while Kim asked
her questions and made drawings at the same time. Before the
performance, DiGregorio had set up his instruments— among them the
aforementioned guitar and cobbler’s stand—in the last space; as it went
forward, DiGregorio began interpreting Kim and Lightbody’s conversation
through singing and playing music. Kim’s questions and her answers
departed from Lightbody’s role as an attorney, and circled around
different legal issues such as habeas corpus (Latin for, literally, "you
should have the body”), which in legal terms states that the
measurements holding someone in custody are not approvable without
adjudication. These terms eventually became refrains through repeated,
rhythmical chants. Meanwhile, projected drawings and a spoken reading of
one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s "Sonnets To Orpheus” (Book II, 23) evoked
the performance’s central theme: the tension between law and the
individual body.
An important part of the exhibition is the artist’s book Ki-da Rilke: In
the book, Kim engages with the work of the aforementioned Prague born
poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926). The first part of Ki-da Rilke
features a transcription and drawings of Rilke’s collection "New Poems”
(1907) in the German original and on thin sheets of paper and note
sheets. The second part features Kim’s drawings inspired by Rilke’s
"Sonnets to Orpheus” (1923), which are then further developed in the
book’s third part, which comprises an independent picture story
featuring recurring characters. These figures are named in an index on
loose sheets of paper. The book’s inherent theme—that of the
metamorphosis of humans and things, language and forms—and the
transparency and double-sidedness of the drawings, are reflected in the
works in the exhibition: the element of duality is recurring in the
show, and Rilke’s poems are quoted in all the films on view. For
instance, in Manahatas Dance, the line "The first star is the last
house” (from the poem "The Man Reading” in The Book of Images, 1902)
forms a refrain that talks about both sides of leaving a familiar place.
Likewise, Kim himself states in Ki-da Rilke: "Nostalgia should not keep
us from going forward.”
Another central element of the book is the "Line Wall” text authored by
Kim, which also serves as the title of the exhibition at Kunsthalle
Basel. The artist uses the German word Leinwand (canvas) as the point of
departure for his text, developing associations in a series of thoughts
and images that, just as in his art and performance works, relate to
the structure of language and architecture and lead back to the body. As
Kim writes: "If a video could be like an architectural form (a form of
labyrinth), this didactic1 wishes to be an entrance to a vestibule; or
rather a separate body of architecture conjoined to the former
architecture, entrance to entrance, like a kiss.”
The publication Ki-da Rilke is designed by Robin Watkins. It is
published and distributed by Kunsthalle Basel and Sternberg Press. The
book can be ordered at Kunsthalle Basel for the price of CHF 40.-.
The exhibition and the accompanying publication were generously supported by Peter Handschin.
Sung Hwan Kim was born in 1975 in South Korea; he lives and works in New
York City. Kim studied architecture at Seoul National University in
South Korea. He received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and art at
Williams College, Williamstown, in 2000, and his master’s of science in
visual studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
Cambridge, in 2003. His solo exhibitions include a.o Sung Hwan Kim, From
the Commanding Heights…, Queens Museum, New York (2011); A Still Window
From Two or More Places, Tranzitdisplay, Prague (2010); Golden Times:
Part 2, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2010); One from In the Room (music
collaboration with David Michael DiGregorio aka dogr), New Museum, New
York (2009); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2009); Pieces from
In the Room, Wilkinson Gallery, London (2009); Sung Hwan Kim: In the
Room, Gallery TPW, Toronto (2009); and In the Room 3 (with David Michael
DiGregorio aka dogr), Gallery TPW, Toronto (2009). Kim’s work has been
featured in several group shows including The Other Tradition, WIELS
Brussels, Brussels (2010/2011); TRUST, Media City Seoul 2010, Seoul
Museum of Modern Art (2010); Art Premiere, Art Basel (with Joan Jonas);
Montehermoso Cultural Center, Vitoria, Spain (2009); Monument to
Transformation, City Gallery Prague (2009); The Demon of Comparisons,
Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2009); and When things cast no
shadow, 5th Berlin Biennale (2008). Kim is currently developing a new
performance, co-commissioned and produced by If I Can’t Dance,
Amsterdam, and Tate Modern, London.
www.kunsthallebasel.ch
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