Installation view of 《dazzled & muddled》 (Primary Practice, 2023) © Primary Practice

Gentle ripples spread across emotions that have been tightly compressed and condensed. The vibrations of images and sounds leaning firmly into the space are dazzlingly ecstatic, yet soon lose their direction and scatter in confusion.

Daum Kim, who has long focused on sensations and emotions that arise at the boundaries of time and space, gathers in this exhibition a range of emotions that collide within individual daily life between reality and the ideal.

Residues of ambivalent feelings—from depression, lethargy, anger, disillusionment, and frustration that have settled into everyday life without ever being fully dissolved, to elation, hope, and joy—are arranged and layered across the exhibition’s spatial and temporal field in the form of various sensory fragments mobilized by the artist.

These emotional fragments of everyday life, difficult to interrogate adequately through language, form certain patterns of their own, but remain unfixed, continually flowing as our moods shift repeatedly between liking and disliking something within a single day.

As art has repeatedly shown, attempts to discipline such experiences through language often end in failure. Rather, one is compelled to acknowledge the realm of sensation that slips outside language and disperses into the air before it can ever become anchored in words.

Just as the emotions of a given day do not arise from a single cause or move in only one direction, fragmented emotional remnants of everyday life, stripped of a center or fixed coordinates, are simply “inscribed” into the individual body. Kim inscribes these incomprehensible fragments of emotion arising from everyday life in the form of lyrics, as if resisting oblivion and examining the archetypes underlying contemporary modes of living.

Yet as though proving that any attempt to hold onto and reconstruct passing time is impossible from the outset, these lyrics are dismantled and fragmented, reconstructed into linear images that resist interpretation and remain on the screen, interspersed with images whose contexts are unclear.

Even while anticipating that failure will be repeated, an obsessive attachment to beginning another day intensifies together with a sense of regret. The scattered, broken text ultimately remains only as an archetype and rule, a trace and clue that evokes the ineffable today that has already passed.

The “Inscription” series consists of texts that aspire toward sounds that have never quite escaped the mouth. Meanwhile, these silent sounds in image form begin to tremble when they encounter other images. In Dazzling Whispers, Playing Stars, the edited montage of images stripped of their original sources does not move toward a completed narrative produced through the combination of shots, but rather toward the emotional dissonance generated in the intervals between one shot and the next.

The coexistence of black-and-white and color, low- and high-resolution footage, graphics and live-action imagery, together with the intermingling of points, lines, planes, and forms, pulls in opposing directions and intensifies the amplitude of emotion. The layering and linking of images arranged almost dialectically produces meaning through structure.

Because the images appear and disappear repeatedly in parallel rather than forming a harmonious causal relationship, they resist narrative coherence. Instead, they seem to redirect attention toward another kind of sensation produced through collision and contrast. Images connected vertically like a chain—the “Inscription” series and Dazzling Whispers, Playing Stars—or sequentially before and after one another within the video, expand or converge in meaning through continuity and unfold before our eyes as dramatic situations.

Each shot, functioning like a single cell, acquires meanings it did not originally possess through its relationship with those appearing alongside it, ultimately producing a larger composite structure.

Installation view of 《dazzled & muddled》 (Primary Practice, 2023) © Primary Practice

Finally, the spatial and temporal sensations generated through these visual collisions and chains of images are amplified further through sound. The artist composes sound that approaches perfect harmony only to pull away again, flowing gently before abruptly shifting in melody and rhythm, and layers it onto the video.

By strengthening its auditory texture, he designs emotional vibrations that move between the poles of comfort and anxiety. Sound is particularly effective in giving a specific sense of place to an exhibition space structured primarily through the visual. It extends our gaze beyond the frames of the images appearing before us, or leads us away from images rooted firmly in the here and now toward past moments or times yet to come.

Image and sound complement one another as both foreground and background, opening up a particular time-space for the viewer. In this space-time, deeply rooted in reality yet constantly seeking escape toward the ideal, a distinctive ambience remains. It might be understood as the resonance of the very “gap” that exists between reality and the ideal.

In this exhibition, Daum Kim confronts reality and dreams of the ideal, but does not force everyday life into becoming an event for the sake of art. He simply presents it as it flows beyond capture—between yesterday and tomorrow, where frustration and courage repeatedly emerge anew—and hopes that gentle ripples might occasionally produce change within this repetition.

The stage he creates is less a division between reality and the ideal than an interface or liminal phase that connects the two. In this place, attempting to leave reality but unable to enter the ideal and thus deprived of direction, the dissonance generated by sound and image awakens the everyday anew as a tremor within stillness.

There is no predetermined narrative here, only emotions of impulse and restraint that continuously dismantle and reconstruct daily life. They are directed toward you, standing here now, endlessly balancing between ecstasy and despair.

References