Sojin Kwak graduated with a B.F.A. from the Department of Film at Korea National University of Arts and earned her M.F.A. in Inter-media from the same university’s Graduate School of Arts. She currently lives and works in Seoul.
Sojin Kwak (b. 1993) has continued to capture scenes of relationships formed through the mutual influence between the photographer’s body, the camera as a device, the subject, and the place. Through video, performance, sculpture, and installation, she addresses the diverse interactions latent beneath visible phenomena and technology, along with the resulting tensions and signs of change.
Sojin Kwak, who began her career as a
cinematographer for films and documentaries, has been developing multimedia
projects since 2020 based on in-depth field research and performative filming.
Interested in the collaborations and constraints that emerge in the process of
merging media and the body, the artist adopts a multimedia approach to make the
invisible negotiations within this process perceptible.
Rather than focusing on the effects
produced by the complex interplay of different media within her projects, she
centers her practice on the movements and cyclical structures between media.
For example, in the exhibition 《Axe and Dummy Heads》 (2020), presented
during her residency at Insa Art Space in collaboration with artists Sollee Kim
and Muyeong Kim, Kwak focused on the ways in which their respective works—using
different media—interrelate, as well as the sensations and residues arising
from the circulation of each other’s questions.
Specializing respectively in video,
performance, and sculpture, the three artists entrusted the unique languages
and familiar sensibilities of their media to the perspectives and artistic
practices of the others. Even within the accumulated temporal shifts of this
process, they situated one another in a flexible relationship between what
remains unchanged and the coexistence of new byproducts.
The exhibition thus opened up a space to
reveal both the present state of works as they traverse different media and the
paths of lost temporality and creation that precede the final “exhibition” as
an outcome.
Looking more closely at how each medium was
exchanged—or even disrupted—through the artists’ bodies and thinking, the
individual works of the three artists existed in forms where their larger
contours or directions either had to vanish without fully revealing themselves,
or where their value emerged precisely within the threat of disappearance.
This, in turn, metaphorically evoked certain situations and the emotions
aroused by the collaborative process.
Formally, one could observe their modes of
exchange in ways such as the reversal of roles between Muyeong Kim’s
performance direction and Sojin Kwak’s stance as a camera operator, or in how
the images proposed by these two expanded through Sollee Kim’s material
experiments.
Ultimately, the exhibition did not present
the three artists’ concerns converging into a single outcome but rather
revealed how, within results formed of various byproducts, each artist’s
“medium-specific know-how” was relinquished under the influence of the others’ perspectives.
Meanwhile, in the following year, at her
solo exhibition at TINC, Sojin Kwak presented the documentary-style video work
Black Bird Black (2021). The video traces a flock of crows
in pitch-black darkness, offering a multi-layered gaze at the color black.
While filming the crows that appeared in
the heart of the city at night, Kwak encountered an unexpected fact: the crows
did not appear on the monitor. The blackness of the crows, darker than the
city’s night, vanished into the same gradation of darkness, leaving only a
single expanse of black before her eyes. To see the crows, one had to pass
through the blackness, and to see the blackness, one had to doubt the blackness
itself.
The exhibition both centers the crows and
sets them as the backdrop, intricately intertwining the meaning and form of
black. The video Black Bird Black layers four sequences
situated in different temporal and spatial dimensions in a documentary format,
subtly linking a non-linear narrative to present a new landscape.
Installation view
of 《Black Bird Black》 (TINC, 2021) ©Sojin KwakAmong the four sequences, the rapid
movements of black and white sweeping across the printing process evoke,
together with scenes of crows scattered across the sky, a sensory reminder of
the cycles of creation and disappearance. The video unfolds within a loop
without a defined beginning or end, hinting at the sequences to come rather
than moving toward a conclusion.
In the exhibition space, a red window
installed alongside the video is linked to the red safelight that appears
within it, blurring the physical boundaries of time and space both on and off
the screen.
The following year, at her solo exhibition 《oh-my-god-this-is-terrible-please-don’t-stop》 at Seoul Art Space Mullae, Sojin Kwak addressed the media-specific
qualities that are either exposed or deliberately concealed during the process
of negotiation between the camera and the body, drawing on the relational
tension of BDSM.
The exhibition title “oh my god this is terrible
please don’t stop” can be paraphrased as “It’s so good it hurts.” For such a
relationship to be established, one must find the point where it is “painfully
good” but not fatal—in other words, mutual communication and consent at the
point of stopping are essential.
Interested in the hierarchies and rules of
the gaze formed by the relationship between the camera and its subject, as well
as by the positioning and characteristics of objects, the artist imagined
moments in this exhibition where the distance and hierarchy of looking begin to
blur.
To do so, she referenced the notions of
“pause,” “consent,” and “consensual non-consent” that emerge from the
relational tension of BDSM—a vulnerable and unstable state. This form of
consent is not a neutral distribution of power but an unequal arrangement
created within a mutually compensatory relationship.
For instance, the video work
Tapping, Scratching, Tracing ♥no talking♥ (2022) directly
reveals the exhibition’s theme by mimicking the genre of camera-tapping ASMR.
In the video, a woman shows herself with acute self-awareness while
simultaneously scratching and tapping the camera with her fingernails. As the
scratches on the lens deepen, the image intensifies, and the physical contact
between the camera lens and the subject turns into ASMR sounds that directly
jolt the viewer’s autonomous sensory perception.
Through the footage recorded by objects
that must remain hidden in darkness to assert their presence as boundaries, and
by a camera lens that willingly subjects itself to damage, the exhibition confronts
us with “images not yet shattered” at the edges of the lens, at the tips of
fingers and toes, and along the boundaries of inside and outside.
In this way, Sojin Kwak has captured latent
relational scenes at the boundaries between spaces through various media,
including the camera. In the 2024 video work HWI-PAN, the
artist documents the phenomenon of wild deer, abandoned by livestock farmers,
whose population has rapidly increased to exceed that of the residents of
Anmado.
The video presents a peculiar coexistence
of deer and humans, with darkness blending their territories. The darkness,
which makes the distinction between “here” and “beyond” impossible, metaphorically
reveals how existing boundaries bend and reorganize through ecological
(im)balances. In the deep night within this space, the gaze of nocturnal
cameras and nocturnal communities, inhabiting the opposite of the daytime,
creates a time and place that compels us to confront what lies beyond us, which
is to say something we are all involved in.
Installation view
of 《Cloud to Ground》 (Replace Hannam, 2025)
Sojin KwakIn her recent solo exhibition 《Cloud to Ground》, Sojin Kwak approached the
formation of lightning as a relational event, inviting the audience to follow
the path of a night walker under a dark sky.
According to the artist, while electrical
currents flow everywhere, lightning occurs when these ubiquitous currents
become entangled in a specific way, forming a momentary relational
configuration. However, the patterns of these relationships drawn in the
atmosphere vanish the instant they are created. In other words, each connection
is uniquely formed but ultimately disappears, making repetition and exact
reproduction impossible.
Installation view
of 《Cloud to Ground》 (Replace Hannam, 2025)
Sojin KwakIn the exhibition, Sojin Kwak referenced
the process of lightning to propose paths that follow a flow opposite to fixed,
linear concepts of time. Audiences walking along these paths become night
walkers, encountering fleeting relational events in which connection and
disconnection, response and silence, and the generation and disappearance of
entanglements occur simultaneously.
Sojin Kwak,
Cloud to Ground, 2025, Single-channel video, color, sound,
4min 30sec. ©Sojin KwakSojin Kwak’s work originates from her
inquiries into the invisible interactions embedded within the networks of
ecology, history, and media. She captures living relational scenes in which
technology, bodies, objects, and sensations are intertwined and revealed. By
traversing between objects, devices, and the body, her work visualizes the
layered sensations and emotions that exist beneath the objective or visible,
allowing audiences to experience these moments through their own bodies.
“A chance encounter is the most
appropriate way to experience the conditions of life, as it engages with
objects, ecology, history, and media connected within a complex network, and is
swept along as part of it. Rather than objective information or logical
narratives, I am interested in capturing the traces and signs of change that
occur before an ‘event’ emerges—the instinctive tension and subtle shifts that
lie beneath visible phenomena and technology.” (Sojin Kwak, Public Art)
Sojin Kwak graduated with a B.F.A. from the
Department of Film at Korea National University of Arts and earned her M.F.A.
in Inter-media from the same university’s Graduate School of Arts. Her solo
exhibitions include 《Cloud to Ground》 (Replace Hannam, Seoul, 2025), 《oh-my-god-this-is-terrible-please-don’t-stop》 (Seoul Art Space Mullae, Seoul, 2022), 《Black
Bird Black》 (TINC, Seoul, 2021), and 《Axe and Dummy Heads》 (Insa Art Space, Seoul,
2020).
She has also participated in numerous group
exhibitions, including 《off-site 2: Eleven Episodes》 (Kukje Gallery, Seoul, 2025), 《Green
Shivering》 (Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan,
2025), 《Waiting for the Forest》
(National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, 2025), 《OB/SCENE FOCUS》 (Art Space 3, Seoul, 2024), 《Frieze Film 2023》 (Amado Art Space, Seoul,
2023), and 《#2》 (DOOSAN
Gallery, Seoul, 2023), among others.
In 2024, she was selected as the inaugural
recipient of the ‘Sisley Award for Young Creation Korea.’
