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Mo Kim, Good Bye, Cherry Blossom, 2013, Installed along the Jeongja-dong walking trail, Bundang © Mo Kim

In this exhibition, Mo Kim presents works that examine a particular sensation experienced in reality, akin to jamais vu—the sudden feeling that a place once familiar has become strangely unfamiliar.

This inquiry began with the artist’s experiences within the dynamically changing spaces of the contemporary city. In particular, witnessing how artificially constructed urban sites transform at a pace far faster and more unpredictable than environments left in their natural state, Kim came to experience a sense of loss, which in turn became an important concern in his practice.

A familiar path along his regular walks, a bus stop, or an urban structure he had grown accustomed to could change overnight, or even a slight alteration to a single part could leave him with the feeling that something precious had been lost; he found all too often that such changes could unsettle his sense of composure to the point that these familiar surroundings appeared entirely strange.


Mo Kim, Good Bye, Bus Stop, 2013, Installed at a bus stop in Geumto-dong © Mo Kim

Accordingly, this exhibition presents works that revisit, from the artist’s perspective, various sites he has experienced within urban space. His method involves placing the specific text “Good bye” in the form of an advertising sign—a characteristic element of the urban environment—so that it becomes part of the cityscape at dawn, a time when emotional sensibility is heightened and few people are present.

Kim accumulates these encounters as photographic records, and the various urban locations he selects are rendered unfamiliar through the insertion of the words “Good bye,” as though they were montage images. Although the text takes the form of a signboard, its placement and surrounding environment generate a subtle atmosphere distinct from that of ordinary commercial signage in the city.

Kim appears to use the words “Good bye” as a device for disrupting the everyday familiarity of the urban landscape. Urban space may be understood as a place where the defining characteristics of the city—“fluidity” and “mobility”—have become habitual through repetition, eventually settling into what is accepted as everyday life.

In Kim’s work, however, the text “Good bye” is inserted as though pressing a “pause” button on senses dulled by the speed of this urban everydayness. What is particularly compelling is that, rather than producing a montage-like photographic image through an easier method such as graphic manipulation—something that could readily be achieved using photographs of urban landscapes alone—the artist personally visits each site, installs the advertising sign, and photographs it in situ.

In doing so, he transforms his own experience into conceptual text and then translates that text back into photographic reality, allowing sensory experience of reality and the layers of thought arising from it to be encountered through a multiply stratified structure.


Mo Kim, Good Bye, Playground, 2013, Installed at Gaenari Apartment in Daechi-dong © Mo Kim

As a textual declaration of a suspension of sensation toward, or relationship with, urban space shaped by artificial structures, the words appear to continually shift their semiotic relationship with the image-text that signifies the city, thereby further intensifying their meaning.

In this context, rather than presenting a factual fiction through techniques resembling photographic montage, the artist employs scenes that appear almost fictional and montage-like while simultaneously emphasizing their factuality. This can be understood as a formal strategy for heightening an awareness of an urban reality that, to the artist, itself feels fictional.

Ultimately, having repeatedly experienced urban space—where unpredictable changes have become an everyday condition—as a source of disorientation, Mo Kim seeks to introduce moments of pause or rupture into the reality of living in the city. Through these moments, he attempts to depart from sensibilities conditioned and accumulated through everyday life and to explore points from which reality can be perceived more autonomously.

Particularly noteworthy is the way he develops this inquiry from his personal visual sensibility toward urban space into a more reflective dimension, considering the relationship between images of the city and texts that condense the artist’s conceptual concerns.

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