Sung Hwan Kim "From the Commanding Heights…*"
Queens Museum of Art
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The Queens Museum presents Sung Hwan Kim: From the Commanding Heights…*, the first U.S. solo museum presentation of the work of Seoul-born, New York-based artist Sung Hwan Kim. Dog Video, 2006 and From the Commanding Heights… , 2007 will be on view in the galleries, where new drawings and architectural elements extend the videos into space and respond to the idiosyncratic gallery location. Summer Days in Keijo-written in 1937, 2007, will also be screened during the exhibition.
Kim’s unearthly works, often made in collaboration with New York-based musician David Michael DiGregorio (dogr), draw on personal and political history to evoke a complex, contemporary global existence. Kim uses simple means and imagery, invented or drawn from folk tradition, to animate strange tales; video or 16 mm footage of his home, his cities, himself performing; voiceover; and intertitles to create non-narrative, multilingual works that are gripping from beginning to end.
In Dog Video, 2006, a query-”People in Amsterdam ask me how it’s different where you’re from”-triggers a string of vignettes: church bells recorded in an attic; power plays between two young men that equally evoke child’s play and torture; and glimpses of dogs in Northern Renaissance art. In From the Commanding Heights…, 2007, misty shots of a Seoul housing complex frame a fuzzy, subtitled international phone call with the artist’s mother who reveals a piece of gossip from long ago. Combined with dogr’s plaintive electronic ballads, the work fully communicates the emotional power of secrecy, renunciation and loss. Summer Days in Keijo-Written in 1937, 2007 follows a young Dutch woman through contemporary Seoul, whose Japanese colonial name was Keijo. A voiceover, based on Swedish ethnographer Sten Bergman’s 1937 travelogue In Korean Wilds and Villages, unfolds incongruously over Kim’s images of a contemporary, changing city. The yearning so intensely present in the works-for home? for the past? for something far less easy to name?-becomes our own yearning for connection and community, regardless of whether we live near or far from where we were born.
Media
Schedule
from March 06, 2011 to August 14, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-03-06 from 15:00 to 18:00