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.
Here, there is a rehearsal caught
in a delayed interval of time—one that resists clear definition. A rehearsal is
a moment that precedes the execution of a completed ritual: a time to revisit
unfinished elements from an internal perspective, away from an audience. The
delay of a rehearsal is perhaps not an emergency, as it remains unrelated to
the “main performance.” Most contemporaries live by the sense of time that
belongs onstage.
Yet what happens offstage, or
beneath it, is intimate and private. At times it hastens the future; at other
times it is postponed indefinitely, without deadline. Preparation—an
accumulation of time without applause—may be essential to fully reveal one’s capability,
but because it relies on tacit agreement among insiders, it can verge on the
sublime.
Here, I encountered those who
pursue a time that exists but can never be witnessed, and those who ceaselessly
summon scenes that persist in memory onto the screen.
—Excerpt from the preface, “(Not
an Emergency) The Rehearsal Has Only Been Delayed.”
