Sung Hwan Kim : Talk or sing

Sung Hwan Kim was born in Seoul in 1975 and is currently based in New York. Kim is the winner of the Hermès Korea art prize (2007), the Prix de Rome (2007), and, with dogr, the Karl-Sczuka-Förderpreis (2010) for the radio work one from in the room. He has held solo exhibitions at various venues including Tate Modern (2012), Kunsthalle Basel (2011), Haus der Kunst (2010), and Witte de With Center (2008). In 2014, he participates in the Gwangju Biennale.

Sung Hwan Kim’s solo exhibition from August 30 to November 30. This exhibition introduces Kim’s art as a systematic integration of video, drawing, installation, architecture, and performance into a single exhibition space. The title of the exhibition, Life of Always a Mirror, is a play on words in Korean on a Korean elementary school textbook’s title, Joyful Life. This method of education merges music, art, and physical education into a single subject as a didactic gesture in public education that teaches the youth not only knowledge but also the way they should lead a joyful life.

The exhibition space of Life of Always a Mirror is divided into two parts. The two, suggestive of one another because of the identical layout of the two floors, form a mirror structure by shifting, repeating, and cutting the original architectural plan. The threshold of the first gallery is shifted toward the end of a long passageway, beyond which architectural structures of different heights are repeated, as if proliferating to construct a labyrinthine path.