Since the mid-1990s, Sora Kim has been actively developing her artistic practice, gaining attention on the international contemporary art scene through her participation in the Venice Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, Yokohama Triennale, as well as solo exhibitions at Seoul’s Art Sonje Center and L.A.'s REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater).

This solo exhibition at Atelier Hermès, following her 2007 solo show at Kukje Gallery, presents new works that can be seen as a turning point in her artistic trajectory. Sora Kim has long devised fictional frameworks—cleaning companies, banks, travel agencies, markets, laboratories, and other socially familiar codes—to quietly infiltrate the everyday. Her exhibitions and works function as negotiations between reality and fiction, and as spaces for staging such negotiations.

The new works presented at Atelier Hermès continue this trajectory by reopening questions about social systems and value structures that the artist has explored since the mid-1990s. At the same time, this exhibition proposes the ideal coexistence of marginalized values within dominant systems of thought. Through the processes of eliminating, translating, and recontextualizing information, objects, and ideas, the exhibition attempts to dismantle existing “systems of meaning.”

The exhibition space at Atelier Hermès has been completely transformed by the artist. Within this altered environment, performances, four video works, and eight sculptural objects appear like scattered islands floating across a vast ocean. These islands do not aim to form a consistent or unified world; rather, they open up questions about how disparate fragments of reality—freed from existing structures of meaning—can coexist. In this exhibition, concrete images, forms, and narratives are stripped of their original context and meaning, inviting viewers to reinterpret and recontextualize these elements anew.

References

• 아뜰리에 에르메스 (Atelier Hermès)