Suwha Kim (b. 1990) has developed performance-based works that reflect on the body within social and cultural contexts, focusing on the events and bodily sensations that arise at the intersection of the body and media. Her practice draws attention to the gaps created by human perception—which evolves far more slowly than rapidly advancing media technologies.
 
Through this lens, Kim poses questions about how connection and communication occur through the body and media in contemporary society, and how the meaning of the collective is formed and unraveled within technology as it passes through the body.

Suwha Kim has worked across theaters, outdoor environments, and screens as both choreographer and performer. In particular, she asks questions such as, “In a contemporary moment where digital spaces—marked by both placelessness and place—along with diverse modes of media representation have become deeply embedded in everyday life, what should the body be looking at, and where should it situate itself?” Through such inquiries, she unfolds a deep choreographic exploration of bodily perception today.

She states that perceptual acts derived from visual experience—from the conscious and unconscious acts of gazing in everyday life to the layered realities produced by industrial technologies such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality—continually prompt us to reconsider the position of our being.
 
She adds that the tendency of contemporary technological advancement to treat vision as separate from a body that senses through multiple modalities is “an extension of modernist thinking, which divides existence into body and mind and partitions the senses into five categories.”

Building on this critical line of thought, her performance Screengraphy (2021) reflects on the presence of the body and space within phenomena where the body meets media such as cameras, Zoom video calls, and virtual reality. In this work, Kim observes the body as a hesitant object caught in the dilemma of losing shared sensory experience, despite the subject’s effort to establish agreements in virtual space and attempt communication.
 
In this way, Kim examines the fragmented perception of physical space and the increasingly unsynchronized bodily senses that characterize today’s incomplete sensory experience—conditions that emerge as the boundaries between real and virtual spaces continue to blur.

In this trajectory, Metahands (2022) explores the body of the choreographer hesitating between virtual and physical spaces within VR environments. Through this work, she questions how a sense of communal presence on the stage—here and now—can be possible when our senses become dispersed across the ubiquitous spaces of the virtual and the real.

These questions stem from considerations such as: “What can we call a shared memory when our senses and experiences differ? And within this indeterminacy, can we still conceive of a body that drifts and shifts as belonging to the same species as before?”
 
In Metahands, Suwha Kim both embraces the dissonance and imperfect synchronization between the virtual and the physical body mediated through VR technologies, while still attempting to reach out and grasp the invisible hand.

Meanwhile, since 2023, she has been exploring Wi-Fi signals and other wireless communication frequencies by creating small machines that convert these signals into sensory forms, installing them in various environments, and observing how both the surrounding space and her own body respond.
 
Confronting moments of disconnection and reconnection, invisibility and unpredictability, instability and lack of control, she imagines the infinite signals that pass through her body. And as she describes, she “chooses to place herself in the in-between—between the distant time and distant space toward which those signals travel, as they brush against the bodies of countless other entities they pass through.”

Suhwa Kim’s 2024 solo exhibition 《We meet there》 begins with the imagination that “if ‘we,’ as ever-moving vibrations, could meet in an unknown ‘there’,” and explores our bodies situated within the vast, invisible mesh of wireless communication frequencies.
 
The video work Connecting Practice: we meet there (2024), which became the basis for the exhibition title, documents the process of completing the sentence “we meet there” by altering Wi-Fi frequencies through bodily movement.
 
To begin, she stored words such as “we,” “meet,” and “there” in different frequency ranges of the sensor detecting the Wi-Fi signal “Android 9707.” She then installed this sensor in an outdoor garden outside the exhibition space, attempting to bring the programmed voice into the physical space.
 
Believing that electromagnetic waves and the body become causes of each other’s refraction and diffraction, three performers repeatedly move their bodies in front of the sensor in an effort to complete the sentence. Yet despite their continual attempts, the connection between the words constantly slips and misaligns.

In another work, Moving Unpredicted (2024), Kim attached a sensor to a studio in Geumcheon-gu, Seoul, documenting a process in which different sounds stored in each signal-strength range were played according to fluctuations in Wi-Fi signal intensity.
 
She input poetic sentences into the sensor. However, these sentences fail to converge into a coherent semantic network, repeatedly appearing and breaking apart. While fragmented voices drift through the space, the screen displays views outside a window—filmed by the artist with a smartphone camera—randomly arranged and superimposed without any causal order.
 
Through this series of works, Kim examines the gaps within a hyperconnected era in which everything is linked in real time through vast data networks. In doing so, she prompts reflection on contemporary encounters that see without observing, touch without grasping, and listen without hearing.

In the same year, Kim participated in the 《MMCA Performing Arts 2024 Showcase》 at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), presenting the performance work Afterbody, which also unfolded within the mobile Wi-Fi signal “Android 9707.”
 
The title, “Afterbody,” refers to a structural component typically located at the rear of ships or aircraft, designed to enhance stability and maneuverability. Kim extends this concept to propose a literal “afterbody” that penetrates the physical body and transcends the boundaries of existence.

Afterbody unfolded in a state where an already existing performance (data) and the live performance occurring before the audience were interconnected. In this context, the electromagnetic waves of Android 9707, traveling at the speed of light, were simultaneously represented as familiar signs and reenacted materially through the performers’ actions.

In today’s hyperconnected world, electromagnetic waves transmit objects recorded as data to us. Yet, data traveling at the speed of light often overrides the longing, curiosity, doubt, and hesitation we have toward the physical body, treating their absence as the default condition.
 
This performance, which traces virtual connections, juxtaposes the performance that already exists as data with the one unfolding before the audience. In doing so, it reveals the previously invisible boundaries that exist between the data-based entity and the physically present body.

Furthermore, in her recent work Square Practice: My References, from a Nowhere (2025), Suhwa Kim imagines a world that oscillates with the kinetic energy of Wi-Fi signals—an environment in constant flux that remains imperceptible to human senses, even as she situates ourselves within it.
 
Square Practice begins with Suhwa Kim seated in front of a device that detects her mobile Wi-Fi signal, Android 9707, and generates sounds in response to changes in its strength. She creates and performs a choreographic structure that captures and translates changes in signal strength into human language, objects, and actions.
 
Every physical condition becomes a variable that intervenes in the choreography, while the unpredictable timing of the sounds becomes rhythm. All bodies participate in this experiment as variables, acting as a counterpoint to the accuracy of signals and data.

In this way, Suhwa Kim’s practice explores the diverse contexts and environments surrounding our bodies today, translating the often imperceptible sensations of these gaps into language, action, and objects for visualization. Her work not only reminds us of the subtle senses we tend to overlook while living amid the fragmented perceptions of rapidly evolving digital media but also enables us to become aware of our continuously renewing bodily sensations.

 ”We connect and disconnect easily in the virtual space. Our encounters via digital media do not allow us to physically touch each other, but they operate by repeatedly creating a sense of meeting the person behind the message through individual acts of seeing, hearing, or reading.
 
(…) The awareness and adaptation to moments when communication without physical shared experiences crosses the threshold of belief is a constantly evolving sensory experience, one that we, living amid fragmented senses with digital media, must closely examine.”   (Suhwa Kim, Excerpt from the preface of 《We meet there》)

Suhwa Kim held a BA in Communications at the Sogang University and an MFA in Dance Choreography at the Korea National University of Arts. She is currently studying at the Master Exerce Agora–CCN Montpellier (25/27), Université Montpellier III Paul Valéry, France. Her solo exhibitions include 《Square Practice: My references, from a nowhere》 (Seoul Artists Support Center, Seoul, 2025) and 《We meet there》 (Jamunbak Art Residency, Seoul, 2024).
 
She has also participated in group exhibitions and festivals such as 《MMCA Performing Arts 2024 Showcase》 (MMCA, Seoul; Denmark Art Hub Copenhagen, Copenhagen, 2024), 《Ob/Scene Festival 2022》 (Mullae Gallery M30, Seoul, 2022), 《UK[REP] Festival》 (MG+MSUM(Museum of Contemporary Art Metlkova), Ljubljana, 2022), and more.
 
In 2025, Kim participated as an artist in the ARKO DAY’s ‘Artist Lounge.’ She was previously selected for the ART SPACE stift Millstatt Festival and Residency (2022) and the Multidisciplinary BENXT program at Mullae Art Space, Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture (2021).

References

• 김수화, Suhwa Kim (Artist Website)
• 2025 아르코데이, 아티스트 라운지: 작가 김수화 (2025 ARKO DAY, Artist Lounge: Artist Suhwa Kim)
• [카탈로그] 옵/신 페스티벌 2022 ([Catalogue] Ob/Scene Festival 2022)
• 서울문화재단, 이달의 작가: 김수화 안무가
• 자문밖아트레지던시, [서문] 우리는 거기서 만난다 (Jamunbak AIR, [Preface] We meet there)
• 하라은, [리뷰] 규칙: 난관을 낙관하시오
• 국립현대미술관, [작품 설명] 다원예술 2024 쇼케이스 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), [Artwork Description] MMCA Performing Arts 2024 Showcase)
• [작품 설명] 스퀘어 프랙티스: 나의 참조들, 아무 곳도 아닌 곳에서 ([Artwork Description] Square Practice: My references, from a nowhere)