Sangha Khym received a BFA in Visual Communication Design from Hongik University and an MFA in Photography from its graduate school. She currently lives and works in Seoul.
Sangha Khym has
held solo exhibitions including 《ASHES TO ASHES》 (PS CENTER, Seoul, 2025) and 《Blurry Dreams》 (Alterside, Seoul, 2024).
Khym has also participated in numerous group
exhibitions, including Perigee Unfold 2025 《Don’t be hasty》 (Perigee Gallery, Seoul, 2025), 《Rehearsal
Delayed》 (CHAMBER, Seoul, 2024), 《2023 Anti-Freeze》 (Hapjungjigu, Seoul,
2023), 《Naphthalene Candy》 (00
of 00, Seoul, 2023), and 《Cuckoo!》 (TINC, Seoul, 2022).
Sangha
Khym’s practice begins with tracing layers of time that remain only in
memory—places that have disappeared or become inaccessible, lost media, and
fragments of individual and collective recollection. Rather than treating past
events or sites as objects to be restored, she observes how memory becomes
blurred, fragmented, and transferred into other forms. This perspective leads
her to view memory not as a fixed record, but as a process that is continuously
reconfigured from the standpoint of the present.
Missing
Link (2019–2024) centers on Bamseom Island, which was rendered
inaccessible following its explosion in 1968, and explores the tension between
the physical disappearance of a place and the persistence of memory. Over an
extended period, Khym met with former residents of Bamseom, collecting
testimonies that are often misaligned and incomplete. In this work, the island
does not appear as a single representable object, but rather as a constellation
of times differently recalled within individual memories.
The artist
later expands her focus to personal memory and lost
media. Temper (2023) begins with photographs from
her mother’s Cyworld account that were at risk of disappearance due to a server
shutdown, addressing the instability of digital data and personal memory. Here,
memory is not treated as something to be preserved intact, but as a process
that is erased and re-emerges, reshaped through emotional negotiation.
In the
recent solo exhibition 《ASHES TO ASHES》 (PS CENTER, 2025) and the work To kill or follow the
shadow (2025), presented in the group exhibition 《Don’t be hasty》 (Perigee Gallery, 2025),
Khym engages with immaterial sources such as lost films and rumors. Rather than
focusing on the vanished films themselves, she investigates how testimonies,
imagination, and the desires of a given historical moment operate as another
form of “truth,” expanding the relationship between memory and record to a
collective dimension.
Sangha
Khym’s work originates in photography and gradually expands to incorporate
video, publishing, and installation. In Missing Link,
she constructs a long-term project that encompasses large-format photography,
interviews, repeated site visits, and the production of a photobook. The
publication Missing Link (2024), in particular,
functions as a key medium through which the work can be experienced beyond the
exhibition space.
memory
lane (2022) emerged from this research process, reconstructing
objects and elements drawn from the memories of former Bamseom residents into
video and installation. Broadcast for a single day across the Han River and
within an exhibition space, the work formally articulates the artist’s view
that memory is not anchored to a fixed location, but moves across time and
space.
The video
work gather (2024) places greater emphasis on
modes of transmission. Conversations that unfold while flipping through old
photo albums, voiceover reflections, and a constantly moving camera together
underscore that memory is not a static past, but something continuously
produced in the present. In this work, landscapes are captured not with
clarity, but in a state of gradual disappearance.
Meanwhile,
works such as Temper and those presented in 《Naphthalene Candy》 (00 of 00, 2023)
foreground the material transformation of images. The use of thermal paper,
heat, and physical contact to fade photographs reveals the coexistence of the
desire to preserve memory and the impulse to erase it. In more recent video
works, Khym employs palimpsest structures, performance, and mirror imagery to
visually compose layered strata of memory and rumor.
At its core, Sangha Khym’s practice revolves around the question
of how memory can be approached. Rather than attempting to fully restore or
represent memory, she maintains a stance that preserves incompleteness and
distance. Her refusal to directly reconstruct Bamseom or reenact lost films
demonstrates a consistent position that accepts the gap between memory and its
object as a fundamental condition of the work.
While her research-based practice initially focused on places and
personal testimonies, it has since expanded to include digital images, family
histories, and lost films. Nevertheless, a photographic sensibility—marked by
selection, materiality, and traces of time—continues to permeate her video and
installation works. This suggests that Khym approaches photography not merely
as a medium, but as a way of perceiving and structuring the world.
Through long-term relationships and sustained attention to
invisible time, Khym addresses memory and record with persistence. Moving
between documentary approaches and narrative imagination, she places personal
experience and historical events on the same sensory plane, a characteristic
that distinguishes her work within contemporary practice.
Looking ahead, Khym’s work is likely to further expand the
structures through which memory and images are produced, using elusive subjects
such as lost media, rumors, and testimonies. What began with specific places
and individual memories continues to move toward collective memory and
historical imagination, suggesting a practice that will persist in exploring
invisible time on a global scale.
Sangha Khym (b. 1999) collects fragments of
vanished or restricted sites, lost media, and forgotten memories, pursuing a
practice that reconstructs invisible time. Working across photography, video,
publishing, and installation, the artist reveals in layered ways the processes
through which memory fades and is reconstituted.
In her early works, Sangha Khym sought to
trace the remnants of places that have since disappeared. For example, the
project Missing Link (2019–2024) traces memories of Bamseom
island, which was blown up in 1968 as part of the Yeouido development project.
Accordingly, the work begins with
testimonies from those who remember Bamseom at different moments in time. Once
composed of solid bedrock, the island was shattered by an explosion, its stones
scattered in all directions—some becoming part of the steps and embankments of
Yeouido’s Yunjungno, others carried away somewhere along the river.
Over time, soil and sand accumulated atop
the remnants, forming the present landscape above what had been the site of the
submerged island. Today, however, Bamseom remains a frozen time–space,
preserved in stasis under a strict prohibition on access.
Over the course of four years, Sangha Khym
sought out five Indigenous residents who had once lived on Bamseom, visiting
their homes multiple times to engage in conversation. As she recorded the
stories they recounted in their later years, the artist followed the places
described in their memories in an effort to trace the remnants of the vanished
island.
By pursuing clues preserved in uncertain
recollections, she imagined unseen, layered times—never personally
experienced—overlapping with the present time and space.
The resulting work unfolds through the
process of returning to the sites that remain today, guided by notes and
photographs left behind by a grandfather, which serve as traces through which
the present is revisited. By capturing these journeys on analog film—a medium
that is itself gradually disappearing—the artist further amplifies the
sensibility of loss and erasure.
At the same time, she compiles these
memories into a book, seeking to hold onto increasingly abstract recollections
by giving them a material form.
Another work produced as an extension of
this line of inquiry, memory lane (2022), began with
conversations with former Bamseom residents whom Khym encountered during the
research process for the Missing Link project. Through the
lives of those who were forced to undergo repeated displacement and
resettlement even after leaving the island, the artist sought to capture an
impression of a fate in which movement and memory are intertwined.
The video was reconstructed using objects
and elements extracted from the memories of former Bamseom residents, and was
broadcast for a single day—February 6, 2022—across the Han River and within the
exhibition space.
Meanwhile, the video work GATHER
(2024) focuses on three elderly individuals who once lived on Bamseom. The
video unfolds through conversations of recollection that take place as they
leaf through old photo albums together. As the three former residents of
Bamseom convey their present-day reflections in voiceover, the constantly
moving camera captures landscapes that appear still, yet are gradually
disappearing.
Bound by the uncanny past of having lived
together on the same island and leaving it at the same moment, their memories
have scattered into different fragments shaped by each person’s present
reality, drifting like faint remnants left along the riverbanks. This old story
is then extended anew as Sangha Khym seeks out the elderly who remember the
island, continuing its circulation through her encounters.
Meanwhile, the project Temper
(2023) began with the recovery of photographs from Sangha Khym’s mother’s
Cyworld account that were on the verge of disappearing due to a server
shutdown. Encountering memories of her mother that she herself did not know
through these images, the artist experienced unfamiliar emotions and translated
the photographs from data drifting in virtual space into printed images, giving
them a physical place of rest.
However, she did not print the carefully
recovered photo data in a way that would allow it to be preserved over time.
Instead, she used a modified thermal printer, allowing the images to fade and
disappear through the effects of time and heat.
In this way, the artist repeatedly erased
and revealed the images through various methods, attempting to reckon with her
own complex feelings toward her mother’s photographs.
In this way, having sought to reconstruct
elapsed time through memories of places that have vanished or are on the verge
of disappearing, Sangha Khym has recently turned to a project that follows
rumors surrounding early silent films whose reels have been lost and can no
longer be verified.
In her solo exhibition 《ASHES TO ASHES》 (2025) at PS CENTER, Khym
set out to reconstruct testimonies and rumors surrounding lost films believed
to have been destroyed during the Japanese colonial period and the Korean War.
Confronting the empty archives that remain before us, the artist explores how
vanished objects persist in the form of “another truth,” shaped by the desires
and imaginaries of their historical moment.
The video work, To kill or follow
the shadow (2025), moving between 1926 and 025, overwrites rumors
about the film Arirang (1926). Arirang is
celebrated as a nationalist film that achieved great success at the time, but
with the original film lost, no one can see it now.
The actor in the silent film whose voice has been
severed, and the words (sound) and text (subtitled) cast over both faces weave
rumors scattered here and there into multiple layers projected in one place.
Moreover, the work adopts the form of a
palimpsest—a technique in which existing text is erased and overwritten with
new content—thereby generating a mechanism that creates yet another rumor-story
rather than the substance of the film itself. In addition, Khym repositions the
audience as actors to participate in the singular event that is
Arirang.
This is revealed through mirror images,
another presence-filled character repeatedly appearing in the video. The
relationship between audience and actor expands into a multilayered structure, intertwining
with the confrontation between narrator and police within the theater where the
film was screened, and the identity split internalized by the colonized people.
In this way, Sangha Khym’s practice begins
from time that circles the periphery and moves toward an anticipated
forgetting—a time in which far more remains concealed than visible. Taking
incomplete and blurred memories as clues for this journey, the artist layers
fading recollections onto the present time and space, reconstructing them anew.
Such work advances as a process that
extends ruptured time into the present and the future. By revealing, in
multiple layers, how memory fades and is reconfigured, it shows how fragments
of memory persist and are transformed within the flow of time.
“I think the urge to hold on, the desire
to protect, and the will to see have become major themes of my work.” (Sangha Khym, interview with Dummy Dump Image)
Sangha Khym received a BFA in Visual
Communication Design from Hongik University and an MFA in Photography from its
graduate school. Her solo exhibitions include 《ASHES TO
ASHES》 (PS CENTER, Seoul, 2025) and 《Blurry Dreams》 (Alterside, Seoul, 2024).
She has also participated in numerous group
exhibitions, including Perigee Unfold 2025 《Don’t be
hasty》 (Perigee Gallery, Seoul, 2025), 《Rehearsal Delayed》 (CHAMBER, Seoul, 2024), 《2023 Anti-Freeze》 (Hapjungjigu, Seoul,
2023), 《Naphthalene Candy》 (00
of 00, Seoul, 2023), and 《Cuckoo!》 (TINC, Seoul, 2022).
In 2024, Khym published Missing
Link, a book compiling works from the eponymous project. In 2025, she
gained further recognition through her participation as a featured artist in
the “Presentation” program of ARKO DAY.
