#40_Sejin KIm by K.NOTe

K.NOTe no.40

Sejin Kim

K.NOTe no.40

Sejin Kim

Publisher Total Museum Press Pyungchang 32gil 10, Jongno-gu, Seoul Korea (03004) Tel. 82-2-379-7037 total.museum.press@gmail.com Director Jooneui Noh Editor in Chief Nathalie Boseul Shin, Yoon Jeong Koh Coordinator Taeseong Yi Designer Heiin Son Sponsor Arts Council Korea Date of Publication 2018.01 ÂŠ Author and artist The reproduction of the contents of this magazine in whole or in part without written permission if prohibited.

Tide of Candles 360Ã&#x2014;1620cm Mixed media on canvas 2017

K.NOTe #40 Eye of the beholder Hong Lee-ji Curator, Seoul Museum of Art

Appreciating a video work or video installation in a museum is a process of forming a relationship to the work through the viewer’s visual recognition. It is a process that starts from remembering, feeling, and perceiving spaces, times, and experiences. As an artist, Sejin Kim is constantly experimenting in various ways to achieve spatial expansions in genres ranging from animation to sculpture, documentary, single-channel video, and video installations. She presents the viewer with an expansion of the sense of vision from the work concluded on the screen. Understanding and appreciating Kim’s work requires that we consider the interaction of mise-enscène and space in the 11 videos she has designed, while focusing our attention on her gaze. Sejin Kim ’s videos do not include much dialogue or explanation. Her camera exists within a hugely constructed, unseen system, calmly taking in the repeated movements of frail individuals offering proof of their own existential value. The figures that appear in her work reveal their positions and the essential frailty of their selves within various networks of relationship, producing images of adaptation to or defiance against a repetitious daily routine as social selves. “The moment I felt even my hands and feet existed for the sake of the convenience store, the me in the window became regarded as an organism with meaning,” says Furukura, the protagonist of Sayaka Murata’s novel Convenience Store People. This book uses its protagonist Furukura and the convenience store where she works to limn the story of “optimized human beings” in an environment where one must follow society’s standardized rules and tacit hierarchy in order to be recognized as “normal.” The focus is less on the day-to-day narrative of Furukura’s life, and 6

more on allowing the reader to imagine her in all her complexity and specificity through the situations and spaces that she faces. The same exploration of individuals and the collective is lifelessly depicted not only through the insularity of figures and the way they move like responding machine parts in a “manualized” system, but also through her video works. First through About YS, Chae (2005–2006), in which a character is related through the adapted memories of others (based on an incident that occurred in an insular workplace), and later through the Urban Hermit 2016 doing some unseen business in an empty building and the Night Worker awaiting morning in city where most of the people have fallen asleep, Kim has depicted individuals existing within groups that are not visually rendered. In addition to her individual narratives in which a group (the viewers looking at the work) observe through the lens of the camera, Sejin Kim has also attempted a subversive framework in her Victoria Park (2008) and Their Sheraton (2006) in which the collective is viewed through the eyes of the “other.” Rather than giving her characters dialogue, situations, or stories, she uses the “mood” and thread of emotion to melancholically depict the multi-layered situations that they face. Over the year,s Sejin Kim has shown a beautiful command of cinematic form and technology, while steadily conveying a visual language all her own. She has also experimented constantly with the staging methods and composition outside the loosely yet sensually constructed screen. With the 2005 Ideal Society exhibition at Insa Art Space, Kim decided to forgo cinematic form and staging in favor of using concrete reality to expand her means of expression beyond the limits of film. The exhibition marked the creation of new visual narrative both in terms of her video’s content and in their method of transmission and composition of the space. The 2014 solo exhibition Proximity of Longing at Culture Station Seoul 284 RTO marked the beginning of Kim’s attempts to use the entire space beyond the screen to form an active relationship with the viewer. 7

She presented an expanded environmental context in which the screen would not appear as an isolated entity; the exhibition environment and staging were treated as equal in importance to the content shared in the video. This may explain why the exploration of light and the unique mise-en-scène in Sejin Kim ’s video works seem naturally to connect to the exhibition space. With the OHP drawing series in the Proximity of Longing exhibition and the work Motion Head, which presents fragmented images from a praxinoscope (an animation device invented in 1876) in a single movement, she physically reveals her contemplation not just of narrative, but of the basic principles of light, movement, and moving images. Sleeping Sun and Night Worker erase temporality through the use of black-and-white images and surrealistic backdrops, turning the conventional notions of night and day on their heads and visualizing the multiple layers of time we perceive and the presence of light within video. The artist’s contemporary sense is conveyed through the formal cinematic aspects she sought to reveal in 2005’s Ideal Society, and through the incisive senses and experiences she has steadily observed and experimented with over the years. Her interest in and exploration of repeated labor in the context of groups and systems has been addressed from a number of perspectives. Hana-Set (2011) is an animated work focusing on the production process at a Japanese-style fast food restaurant based on the artist’s experiences studying abroad in the United Kingdom, while Temporary Visitor (2015) is based on an unpleasant experience she had at an airport. Some of her works expand on a spontaneous perspective stemming from personal experience. The aforementioned About YS, Chae (2005–2006) is a documentary-style work recording the collective behavior at a film shooting location, as well as explorations of consciousness and the artist’s own gaze. The shifting and the sympathy of Kim’s gaze toward the issues and people encountered around her in her experience, and in the society in which we live, are both one of the main reasons her work take on a contemporary 8

quality, and an important reference in understanding them and tying them together. As noted before, Sejin Kim focuses her attention on relationships of individuals and vast systems, and on the simple, repetitive labor that people engage in amid the everyday shackles of an absurd, perverse reality within those systems. Yet she uses her artist’s gaze to render the greater thread and phenomena in a visual narrative form. In approaching the relationships of individuals and society from different angles, Kim has focused on stories of subversion of perspectives, of groups and individuals, of everyday movements and labor. Proximity of Longing 2016, which was recently shown at the Song Eun Art Awards, offers a glimpse of the start of something new in her experimentation. In this work, her gaze has been expanded into a global perspective that is direct yet even vaster. Using three episodes (“12 Chairs ,” “Angel Island,” and “Tortilleria Chinantla”) to tell a story about migration phenomena and collective utopias, it differs from its predecessors in formal terms and composition. In addition to its active use of dialogue, exposition, and music, it also presents subtitles on a screen to share the digital images and information amassed through Kim’s OHP drawing series and various explorations of light, thus furnishing a starting point for viewers to understand her work in a new light. Since she began her video work in the early ’00s, Kim’s filming technology and communicative approach has undergone tremendous changes. As a filmmaker, Kim has produced a fairly large body of work, and the visual language and personal narratives that emerged thinly in the early ’00s have converged to generate a substantial current. So let us return to the beginning and the question of appreciating a video work. What should the viewer’s mindset be as he or she looks upon moments encountered on a screen? How should we view those moments when tiny, slender, personal thoughts expand and combine to form layers that meet at some point? To find an answer, we will need to think a bit more often. 9

Flowers fade before blooming 6×6×3.5m Ribbon, wheel 2014

Proximity of Longing, 1channel, color, 16'50'', 2016

I Here, Paradise I Proximity of Longing, 259Ă&#x2014;776cm 1channel, Mixed media on canvas color, 2017 16'50'', 2016

Proximity of Longing, 1channel, color, 16'50'', 2016

Sejin Kim SeJin Kim earned her MFA in Film & Media Arts from Sogang University and majored in Media Arts at Slade School of Fine Art-UCL. She focuses on the ways in which an anonymous individual reacts with an overpowering social frame and system; either subordination or resistance. Her works visualize her social, political and historical approach when observing a flow of globalization and localism influencing one's life, and a city as "a living platform". She regards one's repetitive cycle of working as an important driving force for observing them. Experimenting with a variety of mediums from videos to kinetic sculptures, digital sound, drawings, and texts, she was honoured with SongEun Art Award in 2016 and Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2011. Sejin Kim has been exhibited at many venues nationally and internationally, including solo shows at Artcenter Nabi, and Culture Station Seoul 284, and group exhibitions at MMCA (S. Korea), MAXXI (Rome), and Artier Nord(Oslo).

Hong Lee-ji Hong Lee-ji graduated from Hongik University and earned a master’s degree from Goldsmiths, University of London. She participated as an exhibition assistant for Liverpool Biennial City States: Terra Galaxia (2012, Liverpool), attended the 4th Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course, and was a research assistant for the 1st Asia Biennial ASIA TIME (2015, Guangzhou). From 2016 to 2017, she was a member of the Naver Cultural Foundation’s “Hello! Artist” artist selection committee. She currently works as curating team director for the curatorial research platform meetingroom and a curator at the Seoul Museum of Art.

Sejin Kim