Issue 5, Profiles

Heecheon Kim

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

Words ANDREW RUSSETH

Photography BORA KIM

Through collages of found footage, computer renderings, and his own filmed material, Heecheon Kim presents a reality that’s slippery and uncertain, where the digital is bleeding into the physical. This is a reality in which “screens are now disappearing, and the world itself is becoming a screen,” as he put it in a 2020 interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries. With his razor-sharp investigations into how technology flattens and reorders the human experience, Kim has quickly risen to prominence. Just a few years into his career, he’s already a veteran of major biennials in Istanbul, Gwangju, and his native Seoul.

Seeing Kim pop up on my laptop screen for a video interview feels uniquely jarring because he appears in so much of his work in similarly remote ways. His face is pasted atop countless people walking outside Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Gate in a black and white passage of Sleigh Ride Chill (2016), and it is smoothed and made up via a filter in a section of Deep in the Forking Tanks (2019). Kim gets inside these ubiquitous appearance-altering apps, teasing out uncanny effects.

What effects do Kim’s gimlet-eyed videos have on the viewer? While I binged ten pieces one weekend, a line from the philosopher Marshall Berman kept coming to mind. “To be modern,” Berman wrote, “is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, the transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.” Kim’s art revels in the destructive threat of modernity, often using Seoul as a backdrop, a city that is undergoing wrenching transformations via soaring real-estate prices and massive development projects.

In Kim’s early works, including Soulseek/Pegging/Air-twerking and Wall Rally Drill (both 2015), the 123-story Lotte World Tower and its neighboring theme park act as fantastical monuments of unbridled capital. In the latter piece, Kim’s camera makes its way high up into the building while it is under construction, hauntingly empty. It homes in on nets to protect workers (or prevent suicides), and South Korean flags are plastered to the skyscraper’s windows, creating a sense of an economy, and a nation, undergoing out-of-control, even unhinged, growth.

Kim’s body of work is a delirious, fractured, mashed-up, and ever-evolving portrait of Korea through intertwined physical and virtual manifestations. In Sleigh Ride Chill, a gamer character named Porky Daddy declares in a v-log that he will undertake a race in Seoul in Gran Turismo 4 for a marathon of 30-plus hours. (Kim, for his part, is “very bad at finishing video games,” he tells me, explaining, “I get bored very easily, and I hate the repetition.” But he plays them because “I want to know what makes gamers so crazy about a game.”) As we watch Porky Daddy’s car fly along Sejong-daero and around Sungnyemun Gate over and over, passing iconic sights, he remarks favorably that the game does not insert stereotypes of what some might imagine an Asian city to be. He also mentions that the Gate was torched a few years earlier—not the only disaster invoked in Kim’s universe.