SEOUL
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art
Soungui Kim Lazy Clouds
Until recently, the name Soungui Kim sparked little recognition in Korean contemporary art circles. The retrospective of her works “Lazy Clouds” at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul has changed that, bringing to light five decades of this interdisciplinary artist’s career in a sprawling, captivating, and occasionally superfluous presentation. Since emigrating to France in 1974, Kim has developed an experimental oeuvre with a conceptual bent, which the exhibition accessed using the metaphor of a daily journal to offer insight into Kim’s guiding philosophy of action without intention. For Kim, the journal serves two purposes: as a record of events, activities, and daily happenings; and as a space for self-reflection, forming new ideas, and working through old ones. In “Lazy Clouds,” a profusion of drawings, notes, studies, and preparatory sketches from Kim’s vast archive served to anchor her work. The continuous daily documentation embodied by these works on paper establishes the fundamentally performative essence of her practice, although the
SOUNGUI KIM, Situation Plastique III – Octobre à Bordeaux, 1973, still from single-channel video: 1 min 45 sec. Courtesy the artist.
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actions she undertakes are not oriented externally toward the audience, but inwardly as a means to explore herself. As such, these works demonstrate Kim’s willingness to indulge her curiosities and maintain a playful sensibility that bespeaks “an open attitude” liberated from the pressure of predetermined objectives—a kind of virtuous “laziness” that the artist espouses. There were places where these journal-like records functioned as meaningful contributions to the exhibition, revealing the genesis and development of works that blend action and object through performance. Sketches for Situation Plastique (1971–75), a series of large-scale outdoor projects that invited the public to take part in kite-flying happenings, depict designs for different types of kites as well as her storyboards for the project’s video documentation. Target diagrams and color charts for Kim’s archerypainting performances I-Hua (1973–85) function in a similar way, helping viewers more deeply appreciate the relational significance of color and directionality in traditional Korean aesthetics, a concept known as obangsaek or “five cardinal colors.” Elsewhere, however, the sheer volume of notes and drawings on view proved unwieldy, whether in dense groupings hung next to larger works or presented en masse in vitrines. Despite the extensive gallery spaces devoted to the exhibition across two floors of the museum, “Lazy Clouds” frequently felt crowded by this surfeit of supplemental materials, detracting from the show’s focus. In addition to painting and performance, Kim’s work has engaged a multiplicity of media over the years, including calligraphy, pinhole Nov/Dec 2019
photography, sculpture, and objects. She is perhaps best known, however, for the experimental video works she began creating in the 1980s after spending time in New York with Nam June Paik, Ira Schneider, Ko Nakajima, and other pioneers of video art. Walk Don’t Walk (1983), one of Kim’s earliest experimental videos, juxtaposes a series of clips shot by the artist as she walked between stoplights on city streets around the world. The resulting conflation of time, space, and action is echoed in Piano Preparé (1985), a twochannel video that activates the artist’s body in relation to a piano placed in the yard behind her studio. Each channel shows Kim playing the instrument in summer and winter, respectively, before she eventually sets it on fire at the end of the winter. Writing to French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy in 1997, Kim declared her work to have “no fixed rules, therefore everything is possible and impossible all at once, as is our life.” By abandoning convention and embracing laziness, Kim synthesizes classical Daoist thinker Zhuangzi’s notion of non-action with Jacques Derrida’s premise of deconstruction in relation to the value-driven machinations of the neoliberal era. Even if this conceptual basis was sometimes obscured by the show’s overtly archival impetus, “Lazy Clouds” offered Korean audiences a meaningful survey of an artist whose body of work transcends borders and ideologies. A N DY S T. L O U I S