The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

SANGDON KIM South Korea b.1973 Solveig’s Song – Step by step plant 2011 Iron rod, cement, shoe insoles, oyster shell / 170 x 65cm / Collection: Wumin Art Center, Korea / Image courtesy: The artist and Art Space Pool, Seoul Speed has been a byword for almost constant change in ‘dynamic Korea’ since the suspension of hostilities with the communist North in 1953. From the aggressive industrialisation of successive authoritarian administrations in the postwar years to the political and economic liberalisation of the late 1980s and early 1990s, development has continued apace, overcoming even the formidable challenges presented, since 1997, by successive regional and global financial crises. Much Korean art tends to reflect this rapidity in broad strokes, polarised into aesthetic and political absolutes by the legacy of the hardline activism of minjung misul or ‘people’s art’ of the 1980s, before being reinvigorated by wildly imaginative takes on the country’s emergence into hyper-consumerism, in the 1990s, by artists such as Lee Bul and Choi Jeong-Hwa. Sangdon Kim is one of a number of younger artists who have found traction for the critical social perspectives of minjung within Korea’s new materialism, by jettisoning the old movement’s rigid ideology and aesthetic determinism. The political modality of Kim’s work is notable precisely for its unassuming character. Nurturing attention to the quieter details of life has long been his trademark: early works preserved, documented and replaced weeds growing next to a fence tagged for demolition, or tracked the trade in Christmas trees from Poland to Germany. In Kim’s work, the city — the locus and consolidation of so much of Korea’s frenzied activity — is experienced not from a bird’s-eye view or high-speed blur that anticipates every turn and every destination; rather, it is savoured street by street, corner by corner, ever open to the chance encounter and the possibility of engagement. For Kim, the nexus of art and politics lies not in trumpeting grand schemes, but in slowing down, taking the time to listen, to think, to see for oneself, to delve beneath official narratives to find what is so often missed, or displaced. Thanks to this approach, Kim has increasingly come to focus on communities marginalised by urban development and geopolitical conditions specific to Korea. He stages workshops, gatherings, street parties and collaborative productions so that residents, activists and artists may engage in creative discussion. He then deepens these endeavours by researching and collecting texts, interviews, documents and statistics. The resulting installations incorporate multiple components — photographs, texts, video, diagrams, sculptures. His ‘Bulwang-dong Totem’ works 2012, for example, are based around a fantasy tale in which a poor resident of a run-down Seoul neighbourhood proclaims himself chief of the ‘Bulwangdong Indians’. The totems are constructed from plastic chairs adorned with exotic palm fronds, garlands of flowers and sumptuous arrangements of citrus fruit and root vegetables. They invoke both a proud shamanic resistance to socioeconomic forces and the fetishism of commodities that facilitates them. His ‘Solveig’s Song’ series 2011 emerged from observations of the unique urban geography of Seoul — hikers in the verdant peaks above the concrete jungle of the central city — and resulted in such intriguing objects, photographs and videos as Step by step plant 2011, a sculpture of a tree sprouting shoe insoles for leaves. In fact, Kim has described the audiovisual landscape that he creates in galleries as depicting a zone ‘in which lofty and vulgar human desires are so mixed that they are indistinguishable’. 1 His talent for transposing personal curiosity into curious objects and environments reflects his concentrated interest in human desires, assisted by a steady attention to detail. Within the seductive aesthetic fields of his creations, Kim destabilises value systems associated with desire: fictions extending from real narratives, and narratives underlying fictions, become opportunities to revalue desires as motivating, destructive or unifying forces on their own complex terms. The products of Kim’s various collective endeavours bear little discernible relationship to the activities spawning them, at least in the immediate sense. No matter how poetic in tone — the artist helped design beautiful kites to spread seeds over an abandoned, but off-limits, US military base — these projects acquire their significance outside the field of art. They ultimately resist aestheticisation, retaining value independent of the adventures of the artist and his work. In millennial Korea, there is plentiful opportunity to enjoy the collapse of time and space, to be caught up in the pace of change as it envelops the contemporary city. Sangdon Kim encourages his viewers to turn away from the machines, to wander slowly through terrain they would usually traverse more rapidly, in order to remain ever alive to the fantastic turns that art and politics may take. Reuben Keehan 1 Sangdon Kim, artist statement, in 2011 Hermès Foundation Missulsang , Atelier Hermès, Seoul, 2011. SANGDON KIM Walking in the city 140