Heewon Kim

Still image from Chapters (excerpt), 2020

Chapters (excerpt), 2020 Color HD video Running Time: 6:00, Excerpt: 1:00

In this video, a computer mouse cursor navigates through a virtual, unidentifiable space. The image is aided with captions that direct the viewer.

Still image from Love Letter (excerpt), 2019

Love Letter (excerpt), 2019 Color HD video Running Time: 6:00, Excerpt: 1:00

This is video poetry with a voiceover narrating a set of words or sentences, paired with images of the everyday scenes in the city.

Still image from Loop (excerpt), 2019

Loop (excerpt), 2019 Color SD video Running Time: 3:00, Excerpt: 1:00

This video shows appropriated footages from an online archive, mixed with the work of a sound artist Delia Derbyshire’s Sea. The video attempts to depict the emotional and psychological state of fear which seems to forever trap one’s soul.

Artist Statement

My videos mourn over the infinite sea of floating data that exists online that are the remnants of our energy; the energy that has been transferred from the real world to the virtual space. However, the videos also praise the beauty of nature as well as of the digital space. I am utterly curious about the way we navigate ourselves in the world that is now detachable and extremely dependent on technology. My works investigate the everyday interactions between us and the technology, and the artificial and the natural. Using my daily thoughts, I reflect on the scene around me and create poetry contemplating the coexistence of the synthetic and the organic. The videos are visual contemplations responding to the questions I have in the current relationship between cyberculture and human nature. The imagery juxtaposes the real- whether it be nature, humans, animals or anything that I could capture with my camera-with the virtual. I create and render digitally generated objects and place them next to the captured images. Through stitching them together, I evoke uncanny yet essential questions to the viewers.

I challenge viewers to participate in scrutinizing our conceptions of the virtual and the real. The inescapable position that we are placed throughout our lives, the ambiguous position in the middle of somewhere. By posing these questions, my works ultimately provoke the given notion of the virtual spaces, as well as our spacial position within those boundaries.