Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Kim has held solo exhibitions including 《Remembering the Deep》 (Seoul City Hall, Seoul, 2026) and 《Altered Nature》 (Soorim Cube, Seoul, 2025), among others.

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Kim has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Meta Platform: Generative Connection》 (KF Gallery, Seoul, 2026); 《Where the Fire Burns》 (Gwangju Media Art Platform, Gwangju; Busan Cinema Center, Busan, 2026); 《Paradise Art Festival》 (Paradise City, Seoul, 2024); 《Generations that Generates》 (Art Center Nabi, Seoul, 2023); and 《Semi Art Community Project: Boo Gie Woo Gie Art Museum》 (Ulsan Art Museum, Ulsan, 2023).

Originality & Identity

Bosul Kim’s practice begins with the understanding that humans and nature, body and mind, and the visible and invisible worlds are not separate but circulate within a continuous flow. Her early work Shadow, My Shadow(2009) reveals the beginnings of this worldview through an inner journey of encountering the self, its shadow, and imaginary living beings, combining video, choreography, and animation.

Brushstrokes and spatial qualities drawn from traditional East Asian painting are integrated with digital imagery, while the protagonist’s eventual return to a single point expresses a cyclical understanding in which beginning and end, creation and dissolution, continue within the same circle. From this early stage, bodily movement and nonverbal sensation became important ways for Kim to understand the world, a tendency that continues throughout her practice as she guides viewers through movement, imagery, sound, and space rather than through language alone.
 
From the mid-2010s onward, her interest expanded from the inner self toward relationships among humans, nature, and other living beings. Changing Tides(2016–2020) was a telematic performance connecting musicians and visual artists in Korea and the United States in real time. Under the concept of a “Requiem for the Earth,” it linked environmental concerns with the Eastern Five Elements and ideas of circulation and unity.

In the subsequent ‘Vital Signs’ project and MICRO Cosmos(2020), biometric data such as brainwaves and pulse rates collected from participants in Korea and New York were combined with microscopic imagery, revealing visual affinities between the smallest units of life within the body and vast cosmic landscapes.

This trajectory became more explicit in Micro Macro Loop(2021), which uses the Five Elements—Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water—as a structure for understanding the transformation and circulation of life, visualizing an Eastern worldview in which an entire universe may be discovered within the smallest microscopic realm.
 
With Hybrid Nature(2022), these ideas of circulation developed more directly into an exploration of the climate crisis and imagined future ecosystems. Viewers become avatars traveling through a virtual ecology where Eastern and Western mythology and culture intersect with genetic mutation and climate change, encountering a world in which human and nonhuman beings coexist.

The female figure of “Gaia” who guides this world does not direct viewers toward a fixed destination, but leads them through bodily gestures and choreography. In Hyper Connection(2023–2024), “water” emerges as a central motif through which life and death, healing and purification, and creation and extinction intersect.

Hybrid organisms generated through collaboration with generative AI and ChatGPT, along with gender-neutral beings, loosen binary divisions between human and nonhuman, female and male, and nature and the artificial, extending Kim’s worldview toward a more horizontal understanding of ecological relationships.
 
In her recent practice, this “world of water” has evolved into a more concrete vision of a future ecology. 《Altered Nature》(Soorim Cube, Seoul, 2025) is set in “HAERA,” a deep-sea city after climate change and rising sea levels, exploring how new forms of life and relationships might emerge after human civilization has submerged. HAERA – Ocean Reborn(2025) presents an alternative habitat inhabited by human-fish hybrids, organic architecture made from coral and mycelium, and organisms born from waste and microplastics.

HAERA – Echoes of Memory(2026) begins with a landscape reminiscent of traditional East Asian painting before descending into the deep sea, where remnants of nature and fragments of civilization’s memories are reorganized into new life forms. Rather than fixing the post-climate-crisis world as an image of apocalypse, Kim imagines what kinds of coexistence and recovery might remain possible within altered environmental conditions, moving her recent practice toward increasingly detailed forms of ecological worldbuilding.

Style & Contents

Kim’s artistic language has been multidisciplinary from the outset. The combination of moving image, drawn animation, choreography, and performance in Shadow, My Shadow established an approach that would continue throughout her practice. In The Vibration of my Breath, dance, video, music, and lighting are brought together to explore the duality of the self and socially constructed roles, while BATIK, Accumulation of Time combines Indonesian batik, Korean patterns, live drawing, and Kinect-based interaction across multiple screens.

Rather than reproducing traditional visual languages in their original forms, Kim places them within performative and media environments where they can function differently. This became an important foundation for her later integration of Eastern philosophical ideas with emerging technologies.
 
From the latter half of the 2010s, networks and real-time interaction became central elements of her work. In Changing Tides and the ‘Vital Signs’ project, telepresence software, 5G networks, holograms, biometric data, wearable sensors, and motion capture connect bodies located in different places within a single performance.

Invisible Touch similarly brings a dancer in Korea into contact with a virtual avatar within an XR environment, experimenting with the boundary between physical bodies and digital entities. Here, technology is not simply a means of enabling remote communication. It becomes a stage for testing how people separated by physical distance might nevertheless share a sensory experience and occupy a common space.
 
This structure of real-time connection subsequently expanded into fully constructed virtual environments. In Micro Macro Loop, physical works rooted in traditional East Asian painting are combined with projection mapping, AR, and music, while Hybrid Nature uses the metaverse, NFT art, 3D environments, and sound to allow viewers to explore the work directly as avatars.

Hyper Connection: Embrace(2024) combines immersive VR with AI, game engines, and motion capture to create a bodily encounter with a future ecosystem submerged in water. Rather than passively following a completed narrative, viewers move through the space, observe its organisms, and construct their own stories and sensory experiences. In Kim’s work, interaction therefore functions less as a technological effect than as a device that transfers part of the process of interpreting the world to the viewer.
 
The ‘HAERA’ project brings this structure back into physical exhibition space. 《Altered Nature》 combines large-scale LED screens, animation, sculpture, sound, and AR within a single XR environment, while 《Remembering the Deep》(Seoul City Hall, Seoul, 2026) overlays the underwater landscapes of a media wall with viewers’ mobile AR experiences. Alongside 3D animation and generative AI, Kim incorporates fluid dynamics, geographic terrain data, and motion capture as materials for constructing these worlds.

Such technologies function less as simulations intended to predict a realistic future than as methods for layering traditional East Asian landscapes and mythology with climate data and ecological imagination. As the number and complexity of her media have increased, the central concern has remained consistent: how the viewer’s body and senses encounter and understand a new environment.

Topography & Continuity

A defining aspect of Kim’s practice is the sustained connection she has built between the cyclical, holistic worldview of Eastern philosophy and digital technology. Nature is not positioned as something external to humanity; humans, microorganisms, animals, water, data, and virtual beings are placed within the same network of relationships.

Concepts such as the Five Elements, yin and yang, and Daoist circulation first appeared as structures through which she explored the body and interiority, and later expanded to connect microscopic life with the cosmos, humans with nonhumans, and contemporary ecological crises with speculative marine ecosystems. Eastern thought therefore functions less as an aesthetic motif than as a conceptual structure that has organized her practice over an extended period of time.
 
Another distinctive feature is that Kim does not use advanced technologies simply to produce futuristic imagery. Telematic networks, biometric data, AI, VR, AR, XR, the metaverse, and motion capture are all employed as means of making “connection” perceptible and experiential.

In MICRO Cosmos, biometric information from geographically separated bodies converges within the same image; in Hybrid Nature, viewers and virtual organisms occupy a shared environment; and in HAERA – Ocean Reborn, even the waste left by humanity is reimagined as a condition from which new life can emerge.

While immersive media practices can often emphasize technological spectacle or the expansion of virtual space itself, Kim combines these technologies with Eastern approaches to nature, bodily experience, and ecological inquiry, using them to make relationships physically and sensorially felt.
 
The development of her practice can itself be understood as a kind of cycle. Beginning with the self, the shadow, and bodily movement, her work expanded toward connections with others through networks, the circulation of microscopic life and nature, and finally human-nonhuman ecosystems within the metaverse. More recently, these concerns have converged within the independent world of “HAERA.”

Water has become an especially important thread connecting these recent projects. It is simultaneously a cause of disaster and submersion and a medium of life, healing, memory, and regeneration. This duality allows the ocean of HAERA to function not simply as an apocalyptic landscape of climate crisis but as a habitat in which different forms of life and new relationships continue to emerge beyond the conditions of existing human civilization.
 
Kim studied Oriental Painting and Industrial Design at Hongik University before earning an MFA in Experimental Animation and Integrated Media from the California Institute of the Arts. She is currently an Associate Professor of Digital Arts at the Seoul Institute of the Arts, where she continues both her research and artistic practice.

She also served as Korea Director of CultureHub, leading a range of international collaborative projects, and her work has been presented internationally at Times Square in New York, La MaMa E.T.C., the Korean Cultural Center in Paris, the Society for Arts and Technology in Montreal, the Prague Quadrennial, and NFC Lisbon, as well as at KIAF, Art Center Nabi, Ulsan Art Museum, and Paradise Art Lab in Korea.

She has continued to broaden the scope of her practice through projects connecting online and offline environments, including 《Meta Platform: Generative Connections》(KF Gallery, Seoul, 2026). Built on her long engagement with Eastern philosophy, performance-based sensibility, and continually evolving technological media, Kim’s practice remains open to further expansion as an evolving artistic ecosystem connecting humans and nonhumans, the physical and the virtual, and inherited ways of thinking with imagined ecological futures.