Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Kim has held two solo exhibitions, including 《No Trace》 (Elephant Space, Seoul, 2022) and 《Default》 (OS, Seoul, 2019).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Kim has also participated in numerous curated group exhibitions both domestically and internationally, including 《Seoul Ghost》 (Upper Gulbenkian Gallery, London, 2024), 《Frieze Film Seoul 2023》 (Insa Art Space, Seoul, 2023), 《flop: A Dialectic of Rules and Fouls》 (Seoul Olympic Museum of Art, Seoul, 2023), 《Right to Mother》 (Hessel Museum, New York, 2023), 《Shift》 (NARS Foundation, New York, 2022), 《Set Up Your Profiles》 (Coreana Museum of Art, Seoul, 2021), and 《Follow, Flow, Feed》 (ARKO Art Center, Seoul, 2020).

Residencies (Selected)

In addition, Kim participated in the NARS Foundation residency program in New York in 2022 and The Factatory residency program in Lyon in 2021.

Originality & Identity

Hyojae Kim’s work explores the boundaries of human existence at the intersection of the body, memory, and identity within digital environments. She traces the replicated and transformed traces that bodies leave behind in digital space, questioning how existence is composed in the constant oscillation between reality and virtuality. In particular, her 2019 trilogy ‘Default’ sharply captures the way contemporary individuals curate themselves on platforms and the resulting fluidity of identity.

The artist views the transformation of the body from a sensory entity to data, and then to an image, as a significant turning point in identity. In SSUL(2019), she presents the increasingly uncertain status of personal images through the character of influencer Nara Kim, whose proliferating images are replicated and commodified without control. In contrast, Z(2019) introduces a future-facing user-subject who willingly becomes the image itself, offering a glimpse into a generation that constructs rather than passively inherits identity.

Subsequent works like Parkour(2021) highlight the tension between physical bodily sensations and digitally mediated interfaces. Through the aesthetics of a trained body navigating the edge between life and death, Kim emphasizes that physical existence cannot be fully supplanted by the virtual. Here, movement becomes a form of performative action that realizes and renews the self.

This perspective is further expanded in Dear Moha(2022), where Kim overlays the historical narrative of her ancestor Kim Chung-seon with her own digital identity, presenting the possibility of transcending the physical body to exist as ‘pure data.’ Identity is no longer singular but is repeatedly reconstructed through the intersection of historical memory and personal narrative within digital space.

Style & Contents

Kim fluidly navigates between single-channel video, performance, drawing, and object installation, employing diverse media to express her themes. Her early ‘Default’(2019) series incorporates SNS-based visual language, selfie filters, and interface pop-ups to integrate the visuality and narrative structure of digital environments. Reflecting real-life examples of influencer live broadcasts, image filtering, and replication, these works offer a hybrid viewing experience where reality and virtuality coexist.

In Z and UNBOXING(2019), technically generated imagery, 3D animation, and fragmented screen perspectives express the multiplicity and self-objectification of identity. These videos expose the gap between the digital self’s supposed reality and its underlying uncertainty, showing that images no longer represent subjectivity but dismantle and alienate it.

Her later works return to the body as a physical presence. In Parkour (2021), Kim captures the movements of parkour practitioners using a first-person perspective camera, drawing parallels with the POV structure of online games. Burning Shell (2023) translates the pressure applied to the ground by parkour shoes into data and visual trajectories, exploring the threshold where bodily motion is reduced to data and simultaneously restored as sensory trace.

In her 2024 works Kissing Belt and Dear the John, Kim uses leather, fabric, metal objects, and drawings to focus on the subtle physicality formed under social constraints. By intersecting hospital aesthetics and the performativity of the dominatrix, these works sensorially dismantle social norms surrounding care, control, submission, and subjectivity.

Topography & Continuity

Kim has consistently explored themes of identity, image, and bodily fluidity and replication within digital environments. Beginning with her solo exhibition 《Default》(OS, 2019), she has directly addressed the construction and fragmentation of the digital self, critically examining the instability of subjectivity in an image-consumption environment.

Her practice has since expanded toward restoring the reality and performativity of the physical body. The effort to retranslate digital traces of the body into tangible sensations forms a new axis in her work, evolving into an ontological inquiry into the boundaries between reality and the virtual.
More recently, Kim has expanded her focus to include the sensory dynamics of care, gender, submission, and control, intensifying her engagement with form and performativity. By shifting from images to tangible materials, she constructs complex narratives at the intersection of power relations and interior identity. Kim is now recognized as an artist who inhabits the liminal space between sensation and technology, history and virtuality, performance and image, articulating the multi-layered ontology of digital-era existence.