Multi-study art

The exhibition title is unfamiliar. It’s difficult as well. Although both alphabet and Hangul are presented, the characters stand in a row like isolated units, not entering the eye; even if you try to read it silently, the pronunciation does not connect. One wonders if this is how it would feel to face an alien language—communication suddenly obstructed. Or perhaps like discovering a prehistoric language—what you see are not letters but unknown fragments.

I am speaking of Sung Hwan Kim’s solo exhibition 《Ua a‘o ‘ia ‘o ia e ia》 (2024. 12. 19. – 2025. 3. 30.) held at the Seosomun Main Building of the Seoul Museum of Art. Kim included in the title both the Hawaiian original and its Korean transliteration. The phrase means, “He learned from him. Was taught by him.” Even this literal translation is rather hard to understand in the mother tongue—might there be a special intention? What kind of work has the artist made and what kind of solo exhibition has he created, bearing with it a native tongue and its translation that can only be unexpected to us?

In fact, for Kim, difference in language, differences in geography and culture, originality and deterioration, dissemination and transplantation have always been problematic theses and contentious content in his practice. In that sense, the remarks I made at the outset about the exhibition title are symbolic of qualities embedded in over twenty years of his work. I intended them as a kind of icebreaker for the reader. That is, by placing atop the key words of unfamiliarity of the object, difficulty of understanding, and original versus translation, I sketched my primary impressions of his art.

Born in Seoul in 1975, Kim studied at Seoul National University’s Department of Architecture before moving to the United States, where he majored in architecture, mathematics, and art at Harvard and MIT. Perhaps because this academic background and transitional life experience form the basis, the artist employs media and methods of expression plurally. He is a contemporary artist adept at visualizing cross-cultural elements into sensorial/aesthetic forms. This is why his works and exhibitions appear as modes that traverse and combine across several fields—video, text, design, installation, music, performance, lighting, drawing—on the basis of a quasi-academic stance. From the early 2000s on, Kim lived nomadically, participating in residency programs or carrying out specific projects in cutting-edge contemporary art cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin, and New York. From the mid-to-late 2010s, he has been active mainly in Hawaii and New York.

For general audiences in Korea, Kim is not an artist easy to enjoy. Opportunities to encounter his works and exhibitions are rare, and the work itself carries rather difficult themes and complex modes of presentation. Conversely, art professionals at home and abroad have paid attention to the aesthetic standard and artistic originality embodied in Kim’s work, and have frequently invited him to significant projects. For example, Tate Modern in London held the opening exhibition for its new gallery The Tanks (2012) as a commission by Kim.¹ And as seen in the solo exhibitions at MoMA in New York (2021) and at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (2023/2024),² influential museums have continuously highlighted Kim’s creation.

The Seoul Museum of Art solo exhibition is likewise the result of his being commissioned for the museum’s “Annual Exhibition of Leading Contemporary Korean Artists,” following Lee Bul (2021), Sora Kim (2022), and Koo Bohnchang (2023). The above facts are informational content to describe an artist. Yet they are also public data and indicators of reputation with which to gauge the avant-garde level and experimental character of Kim’s practice to date. They suggest that his art is not a familiar object of popular enjoyment, and at the same time imply that his works are on a path of pursuing universality that traverses particular regions or cultural preferences.

An unexpected era, another language

《Ua a‘o ‘ia ‘o ia e ia》 is a form in which Kim’s artistic world, the international art world’s response to the artist, and the results of artistic collaborations and participation in curated exhibitions with major institutions are layered and condensed within a single exhibition. Though difficult to summarize, the exhibition’s focal point is that the Korean-born artist Sung Hwan Kim posits the real place “Hawaii” as a space of inquiry into history, politics, culture, geography, and human life, carrying out a “multi-study art.” That is A Record of Drifting Across the Sea, which he began in 2017 and upon which he has focused since relocating his base to Hawaii in 2020.

Kim has continued this research subject as a series, through works presented at the Gwangju Biennale in 2021, the Hawaii Triennial in 2022, and the Busan Biennale the same year. In the current exhibition at the Seoul Museum of Art, that phase of inquiry has reached the third chapter. Accordingly, across the entire exhibition, the new video installation Untitled (2024) is presented alongside the earlier video works Head Is the Part of the Head (2021) and By Mary Jo Freshley (2023), in continuity and stratification.

Interestingly, Untitled is realized in such a way that the artist continues editing in the exhibition hall (“Room 2”) during the run, making it a processual and on-site work in which the audience present at that time and place become involved. On the 2nd and 3rd floors of the museum, not only Kim’s A Record of Drifting Across the Sea trilogy is played on screens and monitors, but also Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1941 film The 47 Ronin, Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 film Ran, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1986 film Sacrifice, and Chris Marker’s 2000 film One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich. In addition, reproduced photographs with archival sources, excerpts of published texts, micro-historical records, and signage designed in adhesive vinyl or acrylic are arranged to partition the space like a rhizome—like a root plant that swells into clumps, interconnects, and grows jaggedly or shoots outward.

As a viewer, you thus find yourself standing at the center of an expanse of reading and seeing the moment you enter the exhibition hall, and you fall into the awkward experience of momentarily losing a sense of direction while the mobility of your brain and eyes drops. Yet such an aspect of the exhibition is intentional for Kim, and unavoidable especially considering its qualitative level. All of it (exhibits, artworks, found materials, exhibition composition) are the particles and totality of the particular direction of research, inquiry, and visualization to which the artist has devoted himself for years, even decades.

The reason the exhibition title feels unfamiliar and difficult is related to that working background. If we reorganize the themes Kim has explored through art using the jargon circulated in academia and the art world, they would be history, modernity, migration/diaspora, colonization, nation, cultural transplantation. Especially if we critique based on the exhibition, in A Record of Drifting Across the Sea those keywords unfold into the Native Hawaiian sovereignty movement; the history of immigration to Hawaii by different peoples and races; the late-Joseon situation of collapse into Japanese colonial rule and the emigration of common people; the untold narratives of Koreans who settled in Hawaii; and the geographical/environmental base of Hawaii and the issues of external encroachment and depletion of it.

This is what emerges when we cross-reference the artist’s purposes and the perceptual objects presented in the exhibition to fit together fragments of meaning. However, even the conceptual terms alone are deep and complex themes that, for the viewer, confront the exhibition as an object for literacy—this burden remains.

It is no easy task to know and enjoy the intellectual and formal processes through which these became artworks and an exhibition, passing through investigation and execution, distillation and synthesis.

Here a primal question may arise. Why did Kim choose Hawaii for such work? Setting aside the viewer’s difficulty of artistic reception or intellectual understanding, why is the subject of this arduous multi-study art—one that demands from the artist himself immense energy and resources, time and performativity, both mentally and physically—Hawaii? How can the image of “Hawaii as a resort,” etched in people’s minds, be broken, and how can the artist—and we—reveal what truly must be known about that place?

From a critical perspective, the agenda can be grasped thus: First, that Hawaii was originally islands of the Polynesian natives and bears deep historical vicissitudes until its annexation as the 50th U.S. state in 1959.

Second, that it is a space connected to Korea’s independence movement history and to the history of Korean immigration to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Third, within Kim’s artistic view, Hawaii functions like an electrode space, attracting and repelling, as it were, the U.S. immigration histories of independence activist Ahn Chang-ho (Dosan), his wife and sons; the “homeland” of composer Isang Yun; the “experience of leaving Korea” conveyed by the Korean-German writer Yi Mirŭk in The Yalu Flows; Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s experiments on language and gender with the characters for “male” (男) and “female” (女) in DICTEE; and the issue of borders and movement, evidenced as public documentation by the “passport issued to Kim Sun-geon in 1903 for emigration to Hawaii.”³

The artist embraced Hawaii as a metaphorical episteme (space of knowledge) in order to examine and construct knowledge about vast and complicated matters that are, each of them, but broken fragments of the past. From the standpoint of an artist from Korea who has drifted across North America and Europe, to know the “other language” of exiles or those who “emigrated in an unexpected era” is the bone of A Record of Drifting Across the Sea, and the flesh realized in 《Ua a‘o ‘ia ‘o ia e ia》.


 
No hea mai ‘oe

One work that especially draws attention in this profound exhibition—one with which viewers may intuitively empathize—is the series Body Complex (2024). It is an installation occupying a wide inner area of the 2nd-floor exhibition hall (“Room 1”), where photographs of the statue of Dosan Ahn Chang-ho we learned from the history of the independence movement, and low-resolution images resembling video stills of Asian men and women, stand on pillars like signboards in an Independence Hall education section.

Looking closely, we find texts indicating that these images include Ahn Chang-ho’s wife Lee Hye-ryeon (1884–1969)—herself an independence activist—their eldest son Philip Ahn (1905–1978), and Bae Han-la (1922–1994), who emigrated to Hawaii in 1950 and taught Korean traditional dance there, as well as her local student Mary Jo Freshley (1934– ). It is, in fact, only while seeing and reading these that we begin to sympathize with the weight of meaning in Kim’s undertaking of A Record of Drifting Across the Sea. Though it may invite the response “pedantic,” in my view this work illuminates Hawaii and colonized Joseon’s independence movement; women and children bracketed out of the male-written narrative of that movement; the hardships of immigrants that cannot be summarized in a few lines; and, nonetheless, those who realized fusion and hybridity on site by enlivening their cultural identities.

Regarding this work, Kim explains it as “a space of translation that can be created when two or more languages enter.”⁴ This is a statement that metaphorizes his own Body Complex as a space, while also defining the particularity of Hawaii’s geographic and politico-cultural space. More than two languages and nationalities; more than two races and peoples; more than two bodies and genders; more than two classes and lifestyles…. If there is a place that exists with such multiple and hybrid qualities, then, for better or worse, people are exposed in everyday relations to the question, “Where are you from?” or “Where do you belong?”

In Hawaiian, that phrase is pronounced and written “No hea mai ‘oe?” The very starting point of what Kim seeks to know in the creative endeavor of A Record of Drifting Across the Sea, and the depth of the horizon of understanding he seeks to share with viewers through 《Ua a‘o ‘ia ‘o ia e ia》, is precisely that question. Why do we ask each other, “Where do you come from”—why do we inquire into each other’s origins? Nowadays we think such a question is an aggressive and rude approach that invades another’s private domain. Beneath such speech lurk dangers of discrimination and exclusion, and so this is a meaningful shift. But from another viewpoint, it is a forming of relations premised on absolute respect and recognition of the other.

That is, a coming-to-know in a companionate relation that advances while acknowledging difference between me and you, between my ground and yours. Etched in my mind is the image of an elderly Mary Jo Freshley beautifully dressed in a cream-colored hanbok, dancing Korean traditional dance in a sunlit studio. It is a trace of being contained in Kim’s video work By Mary Jo Freshley. And for me, it is a thought-image representing the overlapping and connection, the coexistence and orientation, of “Korea–Hawaii.”
 


1 “The Tanks Commission: Sung Hwan Kim,” Tate, 2012. 7.16. https://www.tate.org.uk/press/press-releases/tanks-commission-sunghwan-kim
2 https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5308
3 The above quoted phrases are sourced from “Sung Hwan Kim/David Michael DiGregorio Interview (Interviewer: Max-Philipp Aschenbrenner),” Asia Culture Center Web Whale, 2015. 7, https://sunghwankim.org/study/womanhead.html; and from the work descriptions in the leaflet for the exhibition 《Ua a‘o ‘ia ‘o ia e ia 우아 아오 이아 오 이아 에 이아》, Seoul Museum of Art, 2024.
4 Exhibition leaflet for 《Ua a‘o ‘ia ‘o ia e ia 우아 아오 이아 오 이아 에 이아》.

References

• [비평] [강수미와 '함께 보는 미술'] 어디에서 왔나요?: 김성환의 ‘은유로서 하와이’
  [Critique] [Sumi Kang’s “Seeing Art Together”] Where Did You Come From?: Sung Hwan Kim’s “Hawaii as Metaphor”