Poster image of Minjung Kim Solo Exhibition “Floating Cloud" at CR Collective, Seoul, Korea. Courtesy of the institution.The preface to Minjung Kim’s solo exhibition, Floating Cloud, reveals the dual meaning of the term “cloud,” referring to both natural clouds and digital data storage. Kim reflects on our contemporary attitudes toward images by creating artworks with moving images in data storage.
Photos and videos produced by millions of mobile device users continue to accumulate and float around in today’s virtual space. Kim’s From My Cloud is a work made from surviving videos in iCloud, an intangible storage space on the internet. The artist gathered these footage sources, edited them as if they were endnotes and turned them into a work of art.
Through the works on display, the artist raises various questions, such as what we perceive as “video,” whether the collection of moving images in the data cloud can be established as a “video” work, and whether digital moving images that become “video” works can acquire physical value.
The process through which the stored image is delivered through a video/moving image as a medium requires specific “proper” values determined in accordance with various standards and criteria. However, just as a cloud is a mass of water vapor that is inherently intangible and floats in ever-changing forms, the values output by the standards and criteria that convey the image also change from moment to moment, which is why the artist believes that there are no absolute facts and truths in the medium of video. Instead, because they are not absolute, we can “marvel” at images that flow like clouds, both visible and unknowable.
