When artists collect, analyze and arrange materials for a project, they often capture new possibilities that those materials hold. It can only be described as possibilities since it is similar to discovering a riddle behind an event or an object. I see in Ayoung Kim an image of a curious adventurer who does not stop exploring unknown territories.

Ayoung Kim discloses that Porosity Valley, Portable Holes project (2017) is influenced by Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008) speculative fiction by Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani. Negarestani, in his piece Fragments on Cosmological Politics of Many Worlds for the publication affiliated to Kim’s solo exhibition in 2018, wrote “[y]et holes are not exactly the surface, they are not even regions of space” but “the enigmatic entities.” In the preface of the publication, Kim elucidates that Porosity Valley is a porous space with insufficient probabilities. This description reminded me of a word that came to my mind when I saw the first version of her exhibition in 2018 — which was baroque. “The valley with insufficient probabilities” is reminiscent of the disorderly baroque world where scattered elements are mixed in existence.

If one considers Kim’s other works, they all share the baroque traits. They have contained a sense of dispersion where the whole does not rule each part. At the same time, this aura of diffusion, paradoxically, can instigate bizarreness that extra-minor details are connected to the whole. Gilles Deleuze in his work The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1992) maintained: “The Baroque world is organized along two vectors, a deepening toward the bottom, and a thrust toward the upper regions.” The endless fold that Deleuze discusses “[...] is the point of inflection itself, where the tangent crosses the curve” and is the line of inflection where “the infinite fold separates or moves between matter and soul, the façade and the closed room, the outside and the inside.” The structure of superposition and dispersion that was pursued in Every North Star Part I & II (from Tales of a City, 2010) also reconstructs kinetic energy of the mixed elements. However, this energy does not incite change from within. Since there is no unifying order, it does not objectify the change but the structure itself becomes the symbol of change.

Ayoung Kim traces tales hidden in the folds of history by collecting and analyzing official and unofficial materials. These data take the form of film footage, sound installation, voice performance, scripts and diagrams as Kim leaps from work to work. History of bitumen — mineral acquired from petroleum — runs through In This Vessel We Shall Be Kept (2016) and Zepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens to You, Shell (2014–2015) onto Porosity Valley, Portable Holes. Kim revealed that, while working for Zepheth, Whale Oil from the Hanging Gardens to You, Shell found a graph where water artificially substitutes chasm in the ground where petroleum is withdrawn. This discovery would have given her baroque imaginations. Interminable movement of the porous geologic formation is materialistic but at the same time works as a symbol of movement in an immaterial sense. A possibility that an object suggests sometimes can be detached from its substance.

Movement of the porosity valley that is recreated with 3-dimensional animation accompanies duplicitous emotion of being chaotic and wild yet serene and delicate. The image of rocks being smashed onto rigid surface, due to the opaqueness, is replaced with an inner immaterial realm sans windows or alleyways. This valley, through the imagination of the artist, transforms into an organism and acquires a certain atypical power.

As bitumen — featured in the Gilgamesh epic, the Quran and the Bible — was linked to Palais Garnier opera house in In This Vessel We Shall Be Kept, I wonder where the invisible spirits of countless stones will travel. As the Yemeni refugee’s migration routes, human being’s future itinerary seems to be menacing. China has launched Chang’e 4 onto the dark side of the moon to explore the surface of the moon. Outer space became the arena for international rivalry. Human beings can become a force that threatens to destroy the order of the universe.

Anyhow, Chinese researchers allegedly found, in the deep craters of the moon, traces of olivine which is the constituent of the Earth’s upper mantle. I imagine Ayoung Kim’s portable holes migrating into the dark side of the moon and depicting the ancient scenery predating the formation of the Earth.



1. Reza Negarestani, Fragments on Cosmological Politics of Many Worlds, in Porosity Valley, Portable Holes (Seoul: Ilmin Museum of Art, 2018), 76–77.

2. Ayoung Kim, Introduction: On Porosity and Perplexity, in Porosity Valley, Portable Holes (Seoul: Ilmin Museum of Art, 2018), 15.

3. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, foreword and trans. Tom Conley (London: The Athlone Press, 1993), 29.

4. Ibid., 14.

5. Ibid., 35.

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