Seeun Kim

In her adolescent years, Seeun Kim spent much time in the outer rim of the Greater Seoul area in one of the new urban experiments aptly named the “New City” project. By way of strange coincidence, the Korean government’s decades-long plan to expand Seoul was also inaugurated in the year Kim was born: 1989, just after the country successfully hosted the 1988 Summer Olympics. Bundang, her hometown, belonged to the first generation of the project, which is still continuing after 30 years of experiments.

Typical of the ‘New City’ project, her hometown was always in flux with the construction of new apartment complexes. Kim recollects that her early years were filled with memories of observing the construction of high-rise apartment complexes, rapidly growing as if they were mushrooms flourishing in the wild. There, a new spatial language was born. A curious child with a keen interest in depicting her thoughts in images, she could not help but explore the ever-expanding urban landscape unfolding in front of her eyes. Entire cities were created before her eyes in a matter of a few months and years.

Yet, another kind of spatial language was also being formulated, namely through residual spaces that have not been covered by the urban planning that primarily focused on speeding up the construction. Small plots of land established their own ecosystems in contrast to heavily planned apartment blocks. In many playgrounds, additional small paths were created out of the leftover spaces along the walkways and paved with pebbles for residents to massage their feet. There in the urban leftovers, she also discovered certain rhythms and movements with a different sense of scale.

The time at the Royal College of Art in London gave Kim a chance to reflect on the very visual language and grammar she had been exploring through her early years. A city with totally different rhythms and movements, London was more than just a place she spent a few years enhancing her painterly techniques. Rather, the whole city was an experiential ground to examine different spatialities. For her, hopping on London’s underground and railway systems were lessons in moving through the city’s inner organs and examining the city’s surface. The rhythms and movements of her native visual language were enriched by encountering a new language in the city of London.

<Read the full essay from Issue Five>