Kim Soun Gui was born in 1946 in Buyeo, Chungcheonnam-do, South Korea. In 1966, she enrolled in Seoul National University where she completed both her undergraduate and graduate degrees. In 1972, she left for France where she currently lives and works. Kim works across virtually all known media, including performance, installation, objet d’art, drawing, video art and photography. Her work is nourished by her personal philosophical reflections on time, space, and language. In the 1970s, she began her video-performance projects using video equipment, which resulted in a series of remarkable works considered significant in the history of video art in Korea and internationally. In the 1990s, Kim produced Station o Time and other cutting-edge artworks, involving the use of the internet, satellite and data streaming technologies that are widely regarded as innovative examples of technology-based art. With Lazy Clouds, her 2019 solo show at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), she intuited an artistic, critical and philosophical perspective on contemporary technology as ubiquitous aspect of culture with more explicit and concrete interventions. 

Kim’s long career, which extends from the 1970’s to the present, may be divided into five distinct periods as listed below, along with major projects created in each period: 

(1) 1970-1980: Situation Plastique I, II, III

(2) 1981-1990: Vide&O, I-Hua (one-stroke of painting), etc.

(3) 1991-2000: O Time / Station o Time

(4) 2001-2010: Stock Exchange, Stock Garden

(5) 2011-2019: Interviews and publications / MMCA Exhibition

To her credit and seen as interlocutor, Kim has maintained long-term artistic and personal relationships with John Cage and Paik Nam June since the 1970s and had a creative rapport,  of mutual influence with groups like Support-Surface and Fluxus. Her work derives, almost in its entirety, from her reflections on broad-ranging philosophical subjects, from Southern Song and Qing-period Chinese painting which was theorized by Bada Shanren and Shitao to Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein and his phlegmatic notions regarding logic. Starting in the 1990’s, Kim exchanged ideas with Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jean-Pierre Cometti through discussions and correspondence as well as interviews. Her work from this period, imbued with profound reflections about the world and language, reflects her stimulating intellectual exchange with French philosophers as a cosmopolitan minded Korean multi-media artist. Viewed holistically and considering Kim’s multidisciplinary work and intellectual curiosity and interlarding of some of the best thinkers in the world, her work occupies a unique and unrivaled place in the history of Korean modern art. Terms like conceptual art or media art often fail to capture the depth, percipience, and breadth of her body of work which defies easy classification. She is one of the rare artists who, refusing to be pigeonholed into traditional categories of the art maker or practitioner, has managed to ensure continuity between lifeworld inspirations, philosophical praxis and intense creativity. The fact that such an instance exists in the history of Korean modern art is in itself extraordinary, an outlier in fact, and yet the significance of Kim’s work remains inestimable and intangible in its cultural value.

No data available.

Art of Kim Soungui

Introduction

To properly examine the art of Kim Soungui, it is first necessary to investigate the themes and issues that form the core of her life and shape her perspective as an artist. In 1972, Kim went to study art in France, where she has lived ever since. Kim’s diverse works and activities not only as an artist, but also as a professor and artist-philosopher, clearly stand out from those of other Korean artists, many of whom never venture into criticism. By integrating the traditional aesthetics and art theory of Asia with contemporary elements of Western thought, Kim draws our attention to the process of artistic creation, ideation as driver of methodological approach, as well as the potential power of the psychological and philosophical concepts which underpin her artworks and many of her contemporaries. This major research project begins with a chronology of Kim’s most seminal work and the epochs in which it was produced, thus providing a more precise and objective set of details about her praxis and mentation on aesthetics and logic, before tracing and reinterpreting Kim’s works and processes in cross-reference with significant historical events. 

In this process, an analysis of the more esoteric and techno-cultural characteristics that reflect Kim Soungui’s ideas and approach takes precedence over any considerations of the quantitative size of her body of works. Despite the fact that she has continuously produced art throughout her life, the total number of Kim’s major works is relatively small. Notably, a significant number of her important works are in the format of notes and drawings, conceptually executed rather than envisioned and fashioned on canvas or in photographic or videographic formats and, as such, she has also repeatedly developed a few series of similar works. 

1. Early Years of Kim Soungui 

Kim Soungui was born in Buyeo on July 5, 1946. During her childhood, she was deeply influenced by her family, especially her paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother, who read her literary classics and taught her to write in the calligraphic style. While attending Daejeon Teacher’s College Elementary School, she initially took piano lessons, but later switched to art primarily because she loathed having her hand slapped by the music teacher when she made a mistake reading and performing melodies. Thus, even from an early age, she showed her resistance to studying within a fixed frame, a trait that would come to define her life as an artist. Kim was also strongly influenced by her mother, who practiced calligraphy and encouraged her daughter’s artistic pursuits throughout her life. Another person inspirational person in her formative years was her maternal uncle, who worked in film and photography trades after Korea regained independence in 1945. The artist later recalled that she felt a pleasant sense of curiosity while watching her uncle work with these fascinating new media. 

From a young age, Kim dreamed of becoming an artist and going to Paris, which was then the center of the international art world. As she later recalled, this dream was instilled by one of her elementary school teachers, who said that in Paris she could meet many artists from around the world. One of Kim’s friends in high school and at Seoul National University, where she had matriculated, was Lee Aeju, who in later years became a professor at this same institution and was designated as a human cultural asset in Seungmu, a Buddhist dance performed by monks. The two friends bonded over their shared interest in traditional dance, shamanism, and religion, core influences that can be seen in Kim’s early works. In those post-independence years, Eastern philosophy and Gugak (Korean traditional music) were generally considered to be antiquated elements of Korean culture that were associated with poor or uneducated people. Due to this widespread prejudice, most people were reluctant to openly show their interest in shamanism or traditional music. Even so, during her high school years, Kim went to the National Gugak Center after school, and also studied the danso (Korean flute) for three years under Kim Jungseop.  A little-known anecdote was that she played a danso that her teacher had made by hand from black bamboo. Obviously, Kim’s family and teachers helped to guide her early activities, but she also indulged her own interests by seeking the best teachers in Eastern philosophy and Korean traditional art and music to instruct her, showing that she was determined to pursue her own path and perspective on art from early on. 

2. Early Works in Korea 

In 1966, Kim Soungui entered the Painting Department in the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University. Although she learned a great deal from many of her professors, none had a greater impact than Jeon Seongwoo, who remained an important influence on Kim throughout her life. A student of Jeon Hyeongpil, who had collected and protected Korean traditional artworks during the Japanese colonial period, Jeon Seongwoo became an active modern artist in the US. After returning to Korea, he ran Kansong Art Museum, which was founded by his teacher Jeon Hyeongpil, and began teaching at Seoul National University. A renowned expert in Eastern art, Jeon Seongwoo was noted for his excellent collection of books, art related documents, and cultural artifacts. As a student, Kim Soungui frequently visited Jeon’s studio, where she used his materials to study Eastern art and Buddhism. She was especially fascinated by the mandala, the complex geometric symbols used in certain Buddhist rituals. Meanwhile, she also learned French art history and philosophy from Professor Lim Yeongbang, who had studied in France. Kim was quite fortunate to have the opportunity to study with Im, who used his direct experience to help her understand many complex theories of avant-garde and contemporary art that were circulating at the time. 

In addition to art, Kim also became adept in various Eastern cultural and intellectual traditions. For example, she studied Buddhist calligraphy, engraving, and painting with Monk Seokjeong, a Korean Zen master. She also went to Hwanghakjeong archery field to practice traditional archery, a hobby she maintained even after moving to France. In addition to improving her self-discipline and health (both mental and physical), archery eventually became a key aspect of Kim’s artistic activities. In particular, many of the videos that she produced from 1975 to 1985 contain various archery motifs.

Just before finishing her graduate degree at Seoul National University, Kim went to study in France on an official state scholarship. Thus, all of the works that she made before moving to France were produced as part of her university studies. One of her most important works from this time is Sori (1970), an installation that Kim presented at the fourth exhibition of the graduate painting program at Seoul National University. Installed outside the main building of the College of Fine Arts, this work was quite shocking at the time. Apart from its own intrinsic components, the work also incorporated various elements of the natural environment, such as the wind, random noises, and even the visitors themselves. Hence, with this work, Kim signaled her intention to move beyond conventional paintings and embrace a more conceptual and comprehensive mode that would dictate her artistic creation. To achieve this, she began actively conducting artistic surveys and earnest research into a variety of subjects and tropes. Her early works in France can also be understood as extensions of this phase of her career. 

3. Works in France (by Period)  

Once settled in France and for nearly half a century now, Kim Soungui has maintained a relatively consistent artistic trajectory, staying true to her overall attitude and philosophy. Given such consistency, it is somewhat difficult to divide her career in France into decisive chronological periods. For the purposes of this project, a  decade-specific schema of her time in France is useful.  Rather than assigning each decade a style or characteristic, I have instead categorized them by her major works, exhibitions, or activities, as follows: 

1970–1980: Situation Plastique I, II, and III

1981–1990: Vide + O and One Stroke of Painting

1991–2000: 0 Time and Station 0 Time

2001–2010: Stock Exchange and Stock+ Garden

2011–2019: Interviews, publication, and MMCA exhibition

Through descriptions and explanations of these representative works and exhibitions, this essay seeks to provide a detailed examination of the artistic career of Kim Soungui.

A) Works and Exhibitions of the 1970s 

Kim Soungui has lived in France since 1971, when she received a state scholarship from the French government. Shortly after her arrival in France, Kim received critical acclaim for her 1971 installation Situation Plastique I at the Centre Artistique de Rencontre International of Villa Arson in Nice. The following year, she updated this work as Situation Plastique II, which she presented twice in 1972: first at the south of France and then again in Nice in October. She then created Situation Plastique III in 1973 for an avant-garde festival organized by the city of Bordeaux. To summarize its traveling nature as installation, a three year period can highlight the importance of this creative venture:

-Situation Plastique I (1971): Nice, developed from Sori, Kim’s outdoor installation from Seoul National University

-Situation Plastique II (1972): installed in various places including Marseille, Grass, Cagnes-sur-Mer, Nice, and Monaco 

-Situation Plastique III (1973): installed at Octobre à Bordeaux in Bordeaux

Rather than a single work, Situation Plastique was actually a continuing series of site-specific installations and performances that incorporate sound, video, and natural elements (such as wind). Each manifestation of this series was uniquely adapted to the conditions of the specific venue where it was installed. The core function of these works was to reveal the natural environment, particularly by drawing attention to the myriad thoughts and images that arise in response to one’s surroundings. Encompassing fabrics, balloons, wind, and ocean water, the Situation Plastique works were created through a painting-like process, reflecting both the “Supports/Surfaces” movement that was hugely influential in France at the time and the “literati paintings” of China’s Southern School. Moving past the traditional paintings that she had produced in Korea, Kim actively integrated Eastern philosophy with the experimental spirit of Fluxus or the Dadaists. For her thesis at École nationale des arts décoratif de Nice, Kim focused on the art theory of Shitao, a Chinese landscape painter of the early Qing Dynasty, which led her to research Taoism and Eastern aesthetics. After earning her DNBA (Diplôme national des Beaux-Arts) from the Painting Department of École nationale des arts décoratif de Nice, she was immediately offered professorships at both École nationale des arts décoratif de Nice, and École supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Marseille, demonstrating that Kim’s creative and intellectual prowess and cross-cultural expertise in the field were immediately recognized by French academia. 

From the time she arrived in France, Kim was interested in producing video art. Offering mobility as an emerging medium, the ability to instantly record images, and then to simply edit those videographic images with little technical skill, it was the ideal recording device for an independent artist like Kim Soungui (who has worked alone throughout her career). Unfortunately, however, she was unable to gain access to equipment that at the time was scarcely used by the artist communities in France. It wasn’t until 1974 that she found access. At that time, video equipment was very expensive to rent, and it was quite difficult for artists to find video technicians to work with. But with the support of a local cultural institution, Kim was finally given access to video equipment, which she first used in Situation Plastique II,her installation at a beach in Monaco. For this installation, she set up video cameras at the beach, allowing visitors to watch recorded scenes of people playing ball or flying kites. From this point forward, many of Kim Soungui’s video works involved recording some type of performance: some mundane, others athletic or leisure based. These performances were composed with the knowledge that they would be recorded, so that the video and performance were fully integrated.

In 1975, Kim Soungui came back to Seoul for an exhibition and art forum entitled Kim Soungui Art Festival, where she presented Situation Plastique I, II, and III, along with various other new works from France. This event, which also included discussions about Kim’s works, caused quite a sensation in the Korean art field, showing artists and art professionals the possibilities of linking new art and theoretical discourse together, with les friction than previously thought. In this regard, Kim’s influence can be seen in many art works and activities that subsequently appeared in Korea. Moreover, the title of the event—Kim Soungui Art Festival—showed the artist’s determination to examine herself and her creative process, rather than simply displaying a set of finished works. Hence, with this groundbreaking exhibition, Kim signaled her intention to reject the perfunctory cultural activities and habits of the petit bourgeois. In fact, the event was so unprecedented that the Korean Central Intelligence Service mistook Kim for a seditious figure and confiscated some of her works. The Kim Soungui Art Festival was also notable as the Korean debut of Aujourd’hui, the work that Kim had first shown at the exhibition Painting of Six Days in Marseille. 

In 1975, Kim joined Space Group and various other artists to organize and present Temps–Espace, a collection of experimental performances at the Space 75 Festival. This festival became something of a landmark in the history of Korean art, such that it was recreated in the 2000s at the Art Sonje Center, again demonstrating Kim’s lasting influence on Korean art. 

In 1977, Kim Soungui earned her DEA (Diplôme des études approfondies) in semiotics from Université d’Aix-en-Provence. While at university in Provence, Kim studied Zhuangzi and Eastern philosophy, while also taking seminars by Professor Gilles-Gaston Granger, an international expert on Wittgenstein. Meanwhile, she continued her own self-study of the art theory of Shitao, the subject of her earlier thesis. Also in this period, she attended a seminar and festival dedicated to the avant-garde composer John Cage, one of the leaders of Fluxus, which was held at Centre Culturel de la St. Baume, near Aix-en-Provence. At this festival, Kim not only performed Cage’s famous works 4’ 33’’ and 0’ 0’’, but also met and conversed with Cage, who became a lifelong friend and influence on her work. Significantly, it was through Cage that Kim met Paik Nam June in 1979, who became another of her close artist colleagues. Kim shared a strong philosophical and psychological affinity with Wittgenstein, John Cage, and Paik Nam June, all of whom are crucial for understanding her theory and practice of art. 

B) Works and Exhibitions of the 1980s

In the 1980s, Kim Soungui continued to expand her artistic vision, finding new ways to condense and express her artistic philosophy in her works, highlighted by her representative video work. For Kim, video was the ideal medium for revealing the relation of time and existence. In 1981, Kim Soungui produced her major works Téléphérique I and II,which dealt with spatial movement, and 0 Time, which invokes the absence and multiplicity of time. Seeing “space” and “time” as symbiotic terms and concepts, she used her later works to consider “space-time” as the object of visual thought. After receiving a research grant from the French government in 1982, she tossed a stone onto a map several times and traveled around the globe by connecting the points where the stone landed. Globetrotting as driver to explore new life worlds and cultural firsthand. During the whimsically Dadaist inspired sojourn, she spent three months in the United States, where she met and interviewed Paik Nam June in his New York studio; her recording of this interview was released as Bonjour Paik Nam June I. Her conversations and correspondences with Paik also led to a scholarship to research video art, awarded by the French Ministry of Culture. She also visited Taipei, where she interviewed Chang Tai Tien, the representative ink-wash painter of the time. 

In 1984, she and Paik Nam June celebrated the first full moon of the lunar calendar (a Korean tradition) at Hanilgwan, a Korean restaurant in Paris. In a joint performance that she recorded, the two artists each made paintings that resembled the color bars from television test patterns, inscribed the paintings with their own thoughts on Korean traditional time, and then exchanged their works. The video of this performance was later shown as part of Bonjour Paik Nam June II, and also inspired Kim’s article “Video and Time: Notes on Paik Nam June,” published in Revue d’Esthétique nº5, a French magazine on aesthetics. In this article, Kim analyzes the early works of Paik Nam June by outlining his ideas of video and his concept of time based on Eastern philosophy and Korean tradition. She continued to develop her theoretical research on video at CIRCA (Centre International de Recherche en Art Contemporain), which then led to ten years of research on composite imagery at SNAC (Studio National d’art Contemporain) in Le Fresnoy.

In 1985, at the John Cage Festival in Montreal, Kim introduced her installation Vide & O. Performing a bit of wordplay (in the spirit of Wittgenstein), Kim reinterpreted the English word “video” as a combination of “vide” (French for “empty”) and the letter O, which is a homophone of both “eau” (French for “water”) and the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese character “吾” (“I” or “me”). Of course, “O” also resembles the number zero, adding further layers of meaning. Thus, for Kim, “video” could imply “empty + water,” “emptying myself,” or “emptying to zero.” Developing this idea, Kim also made an ice sculpture of a video monitor that sat atop a pedestal and melted away. All of these conceptions are important for understanding Kim Soungui’s video works, which often express a worldview based on the Taoist notion of inaction or “not doing.” 

In 1986, Kim moved to a house in Viels-Maisons, a suburb of Paris, which has been both her primary studio and residence for the rest of her life. There she became friends and communicated with many French scholars, artists, and philosophers, including Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Pierre Cometti, Daniel Charles, Marc Froment-Maurice, and Jean-Marie Rabaté, as well as the composer Max Neuhaus and experimental filmmakers such as Alain Moreau and Patrick Bokanowski. Through such exchanges and collaborations, in 1986 she organized Video & Multimedia: Kim Soun Gui & Her Guests in Vieille Chairté, Marseille. Kim presented a number of diverse works at this festival, such as Piano Préparé and One Stroke of Painting (which she began producing in 1973), along with her own calligraphy, poems, and drawings. In addition to demonstrating her impressive international network, this exhibition also showcases the aesthetic spectrum of the new “open art” and reveals important changes in Kim’s art. In addition to her media installations, her abiding interest in Eastern philosophy can also be seen in the writings (both prose and poetry), drawings, and calligraphy that she intermittently introduced in exhibitions of the 1980s. 

Other notable events of this period include Kim receiving a sound award at the Japan 87 International Video Television Festival (1987), and her 1988 solo exhibition at Dongui Gallery in the Bastille, which was then one of the most important art galleries in Paris. Significantly, this exhibition was one of the first to feature her sound installation Chant de pierre – Pierre de champ, which had debuted at Empty Words & Mirage Verbal (1986). Riding the momentum from her major Paris exhibition, Kim published Monographie I in 1988. Then, in 1989, she presented Vide + O in Hamburg, Germany, and also held a joint exhibition with John Cage at the John Cage Festival in Montreal, demonstrating her close friendship and collegial respect with the esteemed composer.

C) Works and Exhibitions of the 1990s

In the 1990s, Kim Soungui became more widely known at both the domestic and international level, as she began holding more exhibitions in Korea. In the early 1990s, Kim continued producing video works exploring the theme of “0 Time,” which she had introduced in the 1980s. In 1991, for example, at her solo exhibition at the Musée d’art moderne et d’art contemporain de Nice, she showed 0 Time, Sound Composition, and Téléphérique I et II. Also during this period, she traveled through parts of Asia with almost no money, an experience that inspired her Stock Exchange project, which began in the late 1990s. In 1993, she showed Dream of a Butterfly, a three-channel video installation, at the Fukui International Video Biennale. 

During this period, as Seong Wangyeong later recalled, Kim had two unique photographic devices: a homemade pinhole camera in a backpack and a metallic case concealing a video camera. The pinhole camera consisted of a dark box containing film that was coated with photosensitizer. To capture an image, Kim would simply set the box down, poke a pin-sized hole in the front, and leave the box there for around thirty minutes; then, after the hole was covered, an image would form on the film. The use of such antiquated technology, which required a prolonged duration to image-capture, thus reflects Kim Soungui’s ongoing interest in time. 

In the 1990s, Kim participated in a number of group exhibitions, including Hommage à John Cage (Caen, France); Not Wanting to Say Anything About John (Rouen, France); Locality of Desire: Contemporary Art in an International World (Museum of Contemporary Art Australia); Salon de music (Lara Vincy Gallery in Paris); and Adelaide Installation International (Adelaide, Australia). She followed up the latter exhibition by producing Ciel terre un doigt (1997), a video that she debuted in Rennes, France. 

In a 1995 exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Kim presented Sans Nom(“nameless”), a video on the issue of the Korean comfort women. This work was subsequently selected for many other exhibitions, marking Kim’s transition towards works addressing major political, historical, and social themes. In the early part of her career, Kim passively resisted the political and economic system of capitalism by completely ignoring it, focusing instead on themes related to inaction or wordplay. But over time, she began confronting social problems more overtly in her art. She also became more attentive to the rapid development of technology, as demonstrated by Station 0 Time (1997), which was commissioned by the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology in Cheonan. Using cutting-edge technology at the time, Kim (working with a data expert from the UK) created a complex system that randomly streamed videos and real-time data from various sites worldwide. 

Other important group exhibitions that featured Kim’s works included Sense of Volume and Dimension of Korean Art (1995, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon); Rencontre Internationale de la Photographie (1995, Arles, France); La Part des Anges (1997, Université de Rennes 2); Poetics of Time (1998, Ho-Am Art Museum); Festival vidéo et cinéma de Lyon (1998); and Sarajevo 2000 (2000, Vienna). She also published Monographie II in 1997.

 In France in 1999, Kim introduced Stock Exchange I, her representative work of the late 1990s, which was accompanied by the book Stock Exchange (published by La Maison du Lac). Using streaming technology to show information about corporate stocks in real time, this installation denounced the real-time financial system that represents the heart of the global capitalism. The work was revised multiple times for later exhibitions, becoming Stock Exchange II(2000, Art Sonje Center); Stock Exchange III (2001, Sallaumine, France); Stock Garden (2008, Korea National University of Arts); and Stock Exchange IV (2016, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea). 

D) Works and Exhibitions of the 2000s

After first dealing overtly with social issues in Sans Nom (1995), her video about the Korean comfort women during the Japanese colonial period, Kim continued to intensify her focus on such topics in the 2000s. In addition to the comfort women, her other main target was the neoliberal economy, as represented by stock speculation and financial derivatives. After her solo exhibition Stock Exchange II (2000, Art Sonje Center), Kim’s Stock Exchange series was shown at several festivals and exhibitions in Korea, such as Platform Festival and Design or Art (Hangaram Arts Center Museum). In addition, the book Bonjour (2000, Hong Design) compiled images from the Stock Exchange II exhibition with essays by Kim and various critics. In 2001, Stock Exchange III was held at La Maison de l’Art and de la Communication Center in Sallaumines, France, and P.A.P. was held in Galerie Lara Vincy in Paris. These works condemning the fallacy of the current financial system would prove to be eerily prescient in 2008, when the world was devastated by the economic crisis caused by subprime mortgages and other fraudulent investment practices in the United States. 

After having worked at École supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Marseille for about twenty-five years, Kim Soungui moved to École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Dijon in 2001, teaching there as a professor until 2011. During this time, she continued to meet and communicate with many eminent scholars of the day. For example, for the fourth Gwangju Biennale in 2002, under the theme of “Pause,” she presented videos of her conversations with Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida. The same year, she participated in Soirée nomade/ Hommage to John Cage at Centre d’art contemporain-Fondation Cartier in Paris. Also in 2002, her book Montagne c’est la mer was published by La Main Courante. She continued to actively participate in international group exhibitions, including Past in Reverse, Contemporary Art in East Asia (2004–2005, five sites in the US); Points de vue (2005, Galerie de/di/dY, Paris); Soun Gui Kim/Films (2006, The Film Gallery, Paris); Après dAdA (2006, Lara Vincy Gallery, Paris); and Les Peintres de la vie moderne (2006, Le Centre Pompidou, Paris). 

Meanwhile, in Korea, Kim participated in Memories of Wuppertal, an exhibition to commemorate the first anniversary of the death of Paik Nam June (2007, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art); When Speeds Become Form (2007, Oroom Gallery, Seoul); Stock + Garden (2008, 175 Gallery, Seoul); and 2008 Platform Seoul (Art Sonje Center, Seoul). Her major publications from this period include Stock + Garden (2008, Samuso & Knua); Vide & O(2009, Arko Art Center); and Media City Seoul 2010 (2010, Seoul Museum of Art). 

E) Works and Exhibitions of the 2010s

After retiring from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Dijon in 2011, Kim Soungui focused on writing and making art in her studio in the suburbs of Paris, where she has lived since 1986. She continued to regularly participate in important exhibitions, such as Cage Transatlantique Transatlantic Cage (2012, Galerie Colbert, Paris); Beating the Market, Soun-Gui Kim in Dialogue with Cage, Derrida, and Nancy (2013, Slought Foundation, Philadelphia); Video by Soun Gui Kim (2013, Microscope Gallery, New York); Moon, Where, Beyond the Market, Silence (2014, Art Sonje Center, Seoul); Infinite Challenge (2014, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul); The Future Is Now(2014, La Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille); Asian Film and Video Art Forum (2014, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul); and Descendants of Baekje (2015, Buyeo Cultural Center).

In 2015, Kim published a book of her conversations with Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and John Cage, entitledArt, or Listen to the Silence (published by Slought Foundation, Art Sonje Center, and Institut français de Corée du Sud, and edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté and Aaron Levy). In 2016, she published Do You See? Entends-tu? (Onewwall), a collection of her poems and illustrations. 

In 2016, she also participated in As the Moon Waxes and Wanes, a special exhibition to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, as well as Paik Nam June ∞ Fluxus (Seoul Museum of Art), a special exhibition to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Paik Nam June. Her most recent solo exhibitions include One Stroke of Painting (2017, Arario Museum in Space) and 0-Time (2018, Arario Gallery Seoul). Finally, from August 30, 2019 to January 27, 2020, Kim Soungui held a major solo exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul.

4. Reviews and Evaluation of Kim Soungui’s Art

Many of the fundamental characteristics of Kim Soungui’s works are derived from traditional Eastern aesthetics, which can thus be regarded as the guiding principle of her art praxis. In particular, the spiritual and immaterial concepts related to futility, self-effacement, and inaction that are inherent to her works can be traced to Shitao, a literati painter of the early Qing dynasty. Her embrace of such concepts resonates not only in her works, but also in her overall lifestyle, dwelling alone in the French countryside, where she has been methodically and independently producing her works for the past thirty years. By firmly upholding the unity of thought and action, she has maintained an autonomous life, virtually free from external demands and conditions, which is a crucial basis for understanding her works. Only through such independence could Kim Soungui direct her focus so intently on the world around her to criticize the deterioration of human freedom and originality caused by the hegemony of neoliberalism and techno-bureaucracy. In today’s world, the incessant demand for new and world-changing technology has caused human subjugation, complete detachment from the natural world, and the utter commercialization of art and culture (all of which has paradoxically transformed technology into a superficial object and system for hedonism and automation). Confronting this situation, Kim Soungui persistently uses her works to reveal and condemn the inherently antagonistic attributes of technology, eliciting a technophobic approach often unheard of in Korea’s ultramodern, high-speed digitalized society. 

Starting in the early 1970s, Kim proactively deconstructed the traditional media and language of art through her installations, performances, photos, sounds, and videos. By the 1980s, when video technology had become cheaper and easier to acquire, she was fully immersed in producing video-based multimedia works. But rather than seeking to produce slick works emphasizing technological advancement, Kim instead used poetry and irony to reinterpret our concept of technology within the context of her core principles of futility, self-effacement, and inaction. In the resulting works, technological devices—the epitome of artificiality—are used to criticize or minimize the purpose and centrality of technological development in human development. As technology reached a new pinnacle with the computer and internet boom of the 1990s, Kim concurrently appropriated technological devices to show the vast flow of data and numbers based on interactions between individuals. This approach is exemplified by Station 0 Time (installed at the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology in 1997), a groundbreaking work of media art that visualized data from satellites and the internet in real time. 

6. Future Prospects for Kim Soungui’s Art 

Since 2000, critical writings and intellectual discussions of Kim Soungui’s art have steadily increased. At the same time, she has transcended her status as an artist by actively engaging with philosophers such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Pierre Cometti on ontological topics such as art and culture, nature and humanity, and the overall zeitgeist of our era. Many of these conversations have been documented and published. Widening the scope of her art and theory, she also communicated with composer Max Neuhaus about sound art and collaborated with Patrick Bokanowski on an experimental film. After about forty years of teaching at universities, she retired in 2011 to focus on her own art and research. 

Now, with her huge retrospective exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (from August 2019 to January 2020), Kim Soungui’s career has reached another major turning point. Hence, the current research project by KAMS (conducted in conjunction with the aforementioned exhibition) certainly does not represent a comprehensive or definitive summary of Kim’s creative endeavors, which are ongoing. Given her fervent passion and creative will, this research project likely only covers the early and middle stages of her artistic trajectory.

No data available.