Junghun Kim (South Korea, 1991) is a multidisciplinary artist. His work researches the effects of economic and technological development on humanitarian and ecological consequences in relation to the restless techno capital world. Kims works are conceived as activation systems where poetic, spiritual, and political gestures reveal the dimension of causalities that have remained invisible to our anthropomorphic vision. While searching for regenerative ecological care and its distribution, his work guide audiences into interactive and collaborative environments.
Junghun received his MFA from The Piet Zwart Institute. He was selected for “Korean Young Artist 2021” exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary and Modern Art, South Korea, and “SeMA Emerging Artists Support Program,” Solo Exhibition at Seoul Museum of Art Storage, South Korea (2019). He exhibited at Para Site, Hong Kong (2022), MaMA, Rotterdam (2021), Sign Project space, Groningen (2021), Villa Iris, Foundation Botin, Santander (2017).
The space between each objects are trajectories of your imagination (Geological meditation series 2020-ongoing) - Installation, Ceramic, natural objects, fruits, vegetables, plants, and acrylic on Jute, oil paint on hard paper, dimensions variable, 2020- 2023 (ongoing)
Geological meditation is an interactive practice that I am developing every year with natural objects, vegetables, ancient, modern, futuristic contexts, and artworks to open up as collective meditation. Aim to activate new relations between individuals and our environment and understand and feel sympathy with other lives and phenomena by getting closer to the ecosystem and coexistence by training our imagination in more dynamic, sympathetic ways as decolo-nizing practice and resisting strategy against the speed of techno capital influence.
It is an environment where various ecological and critical layers coexist to evoke performative and meditative practice to stimulate envisioning deep interrelation between the natural world and human beings.
The provided natural objects, fictional stories, images, drawings, and sounds offer multiple trajectories and emotional stories that can work in a dynamic way to stimulate and share the participant’s imagination. And, guiding collaboratively each other to see beyond the natural objects: embodying and imagining from their actual networks, colonial history, micro and macro level of their emotions, migration, ref-uges, and until planetary condition in this Capitalocene era. It is a prac-tice for collective imagination and overcoming our educated perspective by treating non-human beings in a respectful and conscious ways.
Causal transition, Front: Mountain’s scars: The vanishing point of regeneration, 2021 - This is an exhibition view at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. In this commissioned project, I focus on the interconnected network between the human and natural world, coexistence, and our human responsibility. The installation comprises seven sculptures, a small rounded entrance (170cm), and a big exit (370cm), which guide the audience toward a reflective and sympathetic direction and expand a sense of time and synesthesia, creating a field of causation. I created an environment where the audience can see the circumstance of causation through detailed sculptures.Each sculpture contains integrative messages about the paradox of human exploitation and extractivism, showing how its violent patterns are radically changing the entire balance of the earth's circulatory system. Throughout, I am interested in showing other specie's struggles of nowadays and future generations from different perspectives. In the main exhibition ground, we find mutated plants capturing man's manipulation on the earth body in the work "Rootless mutation, 2021", and salmon's frustration of reproduction generated by soil extraction, providing an unavoidable narrative within the work "On the horns of a dilemma, 2021". In the middle of the installation space, "A sense of parallel species,2021", a porcelain work is layering a connected human, horse, bird, frog's skull, and a snail. This work is the key to broadening the audience's perspective together with the big circular door, revealing the interconnection between humans and other species. After the audience passes the main exhibition ground and experiences all stories contained in the sculptures, they go through the big round exit, facing the mirror of the work "Scars of the mountain, vanishing point of regeneration, 2021," which reflects how we humans are being supported by the network of the ecosystem. To find an empathic mind towards the dying codependency of biodiversity, the reflection of our responsibility makes everyone aware of this codependency.
Exhibition view
Becoming One and Many Through Your Soul - Installation, seed, soil, stone, bark, paper mache, plaster, cotton, iron, recycled wooden panel, acrylic on linen, variable size, 2021
“Becoming One and Many Through Your Soul” is a participatory installation that shows and enables people to meditate through an interconnected environment that reflects on the relation between humans and other species' conditions in this unbalanced ecological period.
The collective practice invites people to step into the environment in order to activate an empathetic imagination through meditation. After the meditative experience, participants are welcome to take the seed bags around the soil structure to plant them around neighborhood, in the park, streets, schools, and maybe some at home. Through this action, audiences are contributing to the possible regeneration of our environment by remembering where the seeds have been planted to visit and look after them as an ongoing practice of care.
Exhibition view
Geological meditation workshop view (Inter connective layers for another perspective & Integrative breathing)
Eco dynamics - Installation, ceramic, glass, stainless, iron, clay, resin, animal bone, mixed media, Variable dimensions, 2019
The solo exhibition “Fragmented measure, vitality of the spirit”at SeMA, is distributed in three exhibition spaces composed of paintings, an installation (Eco-dynamics), and an audiovisual projection (0.01x 100), which spreads the sound of ancient ringing bells through sharing each room’s dimensions.
I focused on the limen of the human mind that discerns the world by projecting itself onto others. From a fictional composition and diverse eco-universal imagination, I tried to reveal the invisible influences that have remained forgotten to our anthropomorphic visions.
By creating diverse symbols to show how the interconnected ecosystem is healing collaboratively by itself, I visualize the causal relationship between human hegemony and the natural world to connect cognitive divisions of destroyed natural networks.
Exhibition view
0.01 ☓ 100, The Vertex of the Vanishing Point - This work has found its life during the residency Nightshift at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop, in Scotland, U.K. (2018). The program addressed mostly environmental issues to help the development of ecological consciousness. The vertex of vanishing points aims to question our perception of nature, giving a peculiar vision of an ecosystem. During the residency, I explored many forests and mountains around Lumsden to check how nature was destroyed or designed for human survival. Along my tours I get into a tunning tree trunk, cut a long time ago. I recognized the tree as a piece of remarkable evidence to study resonances between the macro and microcosmos. Its inner structure was comparable to the earth’s inner core. It was the center of gravity for the most incredible life forms, a source of philosophical and scientific knowledge. I moved the tree into my studio to study it and to finalize various experiments.
Among different tests of temperature, I underwent the tree to the temperature of 25º. The tree colors changed, and countless insects were generated in it. The insects were RedSpider Mites. The deadwood was breading and protecting the spiders during the winter season, highlighting the strong interconnection between death and living life in the natural world.
Filming the red spider mites, various behaviors emerged. I found some ironically related to the human’s greed for power. Growing up, the spiders were all climbing towards the highest point, as if governed by “an algorithms of the vertex”. The video, presented as a multiple video installation of 4 channels, inquires the differences and interconnections between human and natural life.
Selected painting series- exhibition view- 2019 - Ordinary objects, symbols and landscapes, together with invisible and intangible phenomena, are visualized through an imaginative approach which aims to question our perception of reality and the structure of cognitive divisions.
In the painting, many movements of time, circulation, gravity, balance, resistance and collectiveness coexist
in the paintings. By connecting the continuity of Yin and yang’s dynamics to cosmological principles and the natural collaboration (circulating earth, water, air, and fire for regeneration and balancing the entire planet), I provide a unified vision for opening up our body and spiritual relation to the natural world, while questioning our
perception of reality and the structure of capitalism.
