When you go by sea, everything changes, Sung Hwan Kim shows

Everything that floats in seawater weathers and changes. Mussels cling to sneakers blown overboard. A wooden plank, thanks to the industrious work of algae, turns into an emerald staff. And the letter that is sent in a bottle, along with the wave stream from one side of the world to the other, is covered in mold and perhaps one letter of the original words can still be deciphered. As an artist, how do you imagine that everything changes shape and content when it is traveling? That everything becomes weathered by the passage of time or because people migrate from one continent to another, from one culture to another?

For the Korean multimedia artist Sung Hwan Kim (1975), who now lives in New York, this question is the essence of his visual life.

At Kim’s first major retrospective exhibition in the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, these questions are asked loosely and the answers are certainly not clear at a glance. Kim’s work, which was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2017, at the MoMA in New York in 2021 and last summer – as a small prelude to the current overview – at Framer Framed in Amsterdam, first and foremost cannot be divided into genres such as drawings. , or music, or video, or sculpture.

Organically connected

In each room of the Van Abbe – there are ten in total – you enter a complete, largely darkened universe, where everything is arranged very meticulously. A film signified by the artist in the so-called Drawing Video Installation (2018-2023), in which a woman receives a drawn giraffe neck filled with snakes, refers to the physical drawings in the room. But the film also refers to the artist himself, who occasionally becomes visible in the video and also signifies his own face. The artist’s voice takes you into the fairy tale. The boundary between belief and disbelief disappears. One mini-narrative seems organically connected to the other.

There are no texts or title signs pasted on the wall in the Van Abbemuseum. The room brochures can only be read outside the exhibition, in the light. And delete the words ‘course’ or ‘walking route’ from your vocabulary, because they do not exist here. There are three entrances where you can enter, I randomly chose the middle one.

That approach certainly costs the visitor something. It takes a day to watch all the often long video works, to understand the connection with the artworks installed, and even then there is a sea of ​​unknown things to discover.

The two best rooms

Is that bad? Well no. Two rooms stand out. The first is room 7 and specifically the film Temper Clay (2012). In this almost half-hour film, the video images of, among other things, a lake, an empty surface, a girl sleeping with an axe, and drone images of the famous Hyundai Apartments in Seoul acquire the quality of a moving epic about disappearance and loss. . That is also thanks to the beautiful composition by David Michael DiGregorio.

In the old hall of honor of the Van Abbe, room 6, the staging is sober compared to the other rooms. A Record of Drifting Across the Sea to see. This room is about floating in a metaphorical sense and about change. There are drawings, (archival) photos and a sound system. Only when you stand in front of the video for a while do you understand how everything slowly clicks together. The Korean narrative voice that sounds from the back of the room becomes visible and understandable in English subtitles.

Misty layer of dreaminess

The artist himself appears and receives Korean dance lessons in Hawaii (a well-known ‘stop’ of Korean migrants on their way to America). The American dance teacher Mary Jo Freshley gained her knowledge from the late Korean Halla Huhm. She was the hereditary keeper of Korean culture on the island. Other ritual practices, such as braiding hair and using reeds for rice harvesting, are also enchantingly filmed.

Kim regularly edits the same images on top of each other, slightly skewed or delayed. This creates an extra layer of dreaminess that is reminiscent of fog. A woman in a colorful kimono smiles, but because of the double editing it is as if the smile is gently pulled from her face and remains hanging in the air. It is an afterimage, a memory of something that was, far away, across the sea.

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