Conversation
Sung Hwan Kim, Chung Seoyoung

Childhood, Growing Up, Habits, and Wet Soil

Kim
You were born in 1964, about a decade before me. From 1964 to 1975, South Korea’s GDP increased significantly from 106 USD to 618 USD. As this illustrates, the Seoul that you and I remember as a child might be similar, but also very different.

Chung
When I think about my childhood, I recall certain words such as anti-communism, counter-intelligence, and curfew; also, the sound of sirens blaring for all sorts of reasons. The image that just comes to mind is of myself as a young child standing in a schoolyard crowded with other kids. More than the classroom, I have a strong recollection of being in the dusty schoolyard, where we would stand in rows and listen to the teachers preach or practice National Gymnastics.¹ I remember standing in the intense and painful heat of the sun. I have more memories of the physical space of the school rather than the activities I participated in there.

Kim
In which neighborhood did you grow up?

Chung
I primarily lived in Suyu-ri and Ui-dong.² They were run-down neighborhoods, located close to the mountains in the northern part of Seoul. I used to live near a creek that had a narrow wooden bridge without even any railing. Every rainy season, the alleys would flood with water, leaving them more often than not muddy and dirty. In the winter, the wet soil would freeze in its rugged state – I always felt sick to my stomach when I walked on the swampy, dull-colored ground. Even now, these neighborhoods remain relatively underdeveloped. I lived there until I completed my graduate program.

Kim
It was only recently that the educational institution formerly known³ as the “national people’s school” was renamed to elementary school, in an effort to shed its Japanese imperialist legacy. As such, we both seem to have grown up in the aftermath of early 20th-century modern history. Born in 1975, I have many memories of competitions and awards that educate Confucian curriculum coupled with ideological indoctrination such as anti-communism writing, speech, and poster contests. I am curious about your childhood and early school education.

Chung
I used to do well in writing contests; my father was a poet⁴ so we had many books in our house. I began reading books meant for adults at a young age, around eleven or twelve. I used to lie on a narrow porch and read collections of classic world and Korean literature without fully understanding them. I read less children’s literature and more books like the Sam Jung Dang pocket editions⁵ such as The Cloud Dream of the Nine⁶ and Fyodor Dostoyevsky all printed in vertical writing. I remember being particularly fascinated by Choe Inhun’s The Square when I was in middle school.⁷ My habit of reading anything I could find on my father’s bookshelf continued into my teenage years. As a result, I was absorbing thoughts that were too difficult, heavy, and complicated for a child my age. The knowledge simply overwhelmed me and at a certain point started to really bother me.

Kim
In the 1980s, art college prep students typically spent three to four hours or more at private institutes called ateliers in order to prepare for the entrance exams. At these institutes, students learned skills and knowledge by drawing objects in correct proportions on paper and studying the relationship between light and objects. As you got into the habit of frequenting the atelier space daily, you likely adapted to it psychologically.

Chung
I first became interested in art while I was in middle school; my father didn’t let me join an atelier when I tried to in my first year of high school. But in the following year, my mother secretly enrolled me in one owned by a relative who was a painter. Eventually, my father found out and there was a big fuss, but he relented to my stubbornness in the end. Later, he even looked up other ateliers for me through his acquaintances.
At the time, all ateliers were similar in their conditions and environments and mine was no exception – a typical, undersized studio space with plaster cast busts of Agrippa or Giuliano de’ Medici and still life objects such as kettles, fruits, vases, beer bottles, leeks, flowers, cabbages, pomegranates, and quinces. I didn’t particularly enjoy the education I received there. As I was learning how to paint still lifes with watercolors and pencil draw precise replicas of Greek statues, I struggled to understand all the instructions on what to do and what not to do. I learned about formal balance, proportion, volume, and density, but I wasn’t particularly talented in these areas. Despite this, I kept plodding on until a new art teacher at school introduced me to plastic arts. I enjoyed sculpting heads alone in the classroom – this was a breakthrough. I liked the feel of wet clay. At ateliers, you could only do pencil drawings, which was the only way to get into an art school. Looking back, I don’t feel that I made significant progress in that environment. It seems that I just passed the time there to move on to the next step.

Part I.

The Distance or Relationship between the Times, Society, and Chung Seoyoung

The Sculpture Department at Seoul National University, Perspectives on the Schizophrenia of the Divided Koreas, ##and Minjung

Kim
In 1983, when you entered college, the South Korean public broadcaster KBS 1TV aired Finding Dispersed Families, which was a groundbreaking event in TV media history.⁸ The same year saw the Rangoon bombing in Burma.⁹ The show Love and Truth, written by Kim Soo-Hyun, aired from 1984 to 1985. Its plot featuring switched twins and the siblings’ disparate destinies metaphorically resonated with the reality of the times. You attended college at a time when the 1980 Gwangju Democratization Movement was being referred to as the Gwangju Incident, if it was even brought up.¹⁰ I want to picture even roughly what your time at the sculpture department at Seoul National University (SNU) was like during this period.

Chung
The Korean educational system was constantly changing and back then there was a graduation quota system. Many students were admitted, but if they performed poorly, they had to leave at the end of the year. There were about thirty of us in the art department, half men and half women.
Works that addressed social issues were largely absent from the sculpture department. We mostly focused on training in modern carving and modeling techniques and distinguished the question of form into the categories of the figurative and the abstract. I also remember hearing about the concept of form and content. The focus was on learning what was taught and there was little emphasis on exploring diverse formative elements or considering the social and political context of the times. As a result of these limitations, I lost confidence in my talent and seriously considered dropping out of school. I was susceptible to the mix of day-to-day repression and deficiency caused by the socio-political environment of the 1980s and I could not help but suffer from an undefinable mental and psychological imbalance. In hindsight, this was probably not unique to my department. The repression and deficiency permeated my thoughts and presented unavoidable challenges. On the other hand, I did passionately enjoy the energy emitted from the intensive labor in making sculptures and experiencing the materials themselves.

Kim
Through your relationship with your poet father, you may already have been familiar with how the older generation of literary figures socialized and conversed – the outer appearance of the discourse. I am curious about what was noticeable concerning the professors at SNU’s sculpture department.

Chung
Compared to poets, most of the older artists tended to either use more realistic language or not speak at all, and I thought they were more equipped as members of society. I remember the poets who interacted with my father as extremely inhibited and vehemently assertive simultaneously, which was reflected in the way they talked, interacted, and perceived the world. Some of the poets were also Buddhist monks who were merrier and gentler than the other poets. In college, almost all of the professors were men and I don’t remember the specific conversations I had with them. Most of them were kind to me. Among the older male professors at SNU, there was a group that revered Kim Chong Yung as their teacher and supported the thoughts of the sculpture department’s founder. Zen riddles were commonly shared amongst them and they conveyed and transmitted Kim’s ideas. I remember just listening to what professors like Choi Jong Tae and Choi Eui Soon said rather than having a conversation with them about my work. The professors mostly worked on abstract sculpture. Choi Jong Tae was Catholic and mainly made sculptures of abstract figures and simplified faces with religious connotations. If you look at the work of Choi Eui Soon, Um Tai Jung, Chon Joon, and Choi Man Lin, you can get a sense of the educational environment of the time while I was in college.
In my second year, Choi Insu became a lecturer and this opened the door for me to experience formative attempts that I had not encountered before. I enjoyed his class because the atmosphere was very open and supportive of experimentation; he greatly influenced me for a while. There was a female professor named Ahn Sung Bok who worked with stones and we shared pleasant and frank conversations about the world rather than just talking about art. Or we made infused liquors together. We talked about all kinds of things from the trivial to the far-sighted, while tasting different types of liquor. The conversations I had with her were quite different from the ones I had with the male professors, both in terms of the topics discussed and the way the conversation unfolded.

Kim
Did the aforementioned broadcast Finding Dispersed Families leave any impression on you?

Chung
It certainly did. However, I didn’t think of it from a specific perspective at the time. There were some unforgettable moments I saw on TV and, after much time had passed, other moments reappeared in front of me clearly through artist Lim Minouk’s work. My memory of the event is like simply standing in a sudden rain shower without an umbrella. When the downpour ends, although completely drenched, one has to take a step off the ground to continue on their way again. But doesn’t that rain’s aftermath shift its state and shape until it is unrecognizable, so no one can escape it anymore?
I remember coming to school at dawn and seeing the riot police for the first time standing on a hill like Roman soldiers with their faces hidden under their helmets. I wasn’t an active participant in the democratization movement. Still, I remember that time as the ideological swamp that Korean society was submerged in, a chain of oppression and discord, and pain caused by the ignorance or negligence of reality that could not be captured in a category.

Kim
Compared to now, there was a significant lag between South Korea and international communities in the 1980s. Even popular American movies like ET or Indiana Jones took a couple of years to be distributed in Korea. The main job of cultural experts seemed to consist of reducing this lag. The concept of “advancement,” which was emphasized to the whole society prioritizing economic growth, was tied to the image of someone who had access to information sources and was slightly ahead of everyone else. I think there was a culture of seeking or keeping up with this advancement then. The Whitney Biennial in Seoul (1993) hosted by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art could be seen as an example of this.¹¹
You studied abroad in Germany – as opposed to the US – from 1989 until 1996. It was around the time when the large-scale exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s (1999), headed by Jane Farver originally at the Queens Museum, was traveling and being widely discussed. The Korean Minjung art movement was a significant part of this exhibition; the show was also closely connected to Mo Bahc a.k.a. Bahc Yiso – whom you were close with – and his experience as an immigrant and international student in the US. I’m curious about your thoughts on how the schizophrenic state of South Korean society you experienced as a young person was historicized from a specific angle within the global and Korean art scenes.

Chung
There is always a lag between history and the individual. There are not that many cases in which the Korea’s societal conditions that you just mentioned were internationally historicized. Therefore, the context arising from such limitation inevitably is more misaligned than concurring with the individual. It is also not surprising that the discord between context and the self escalates, considering the problem of language, the experiential limits inherent in art, and what a person taking the initiative deems urgent – all these aspects in relation to the question of exhibitions. I am speaking in the present tense since this is an ongoing issue that persists on another layer. Nonetheless, I think there have been many approaches in the Korean art scene, in theory and practice, that addressed the categories and movements affected by socio-political issues as well as the ways in which an artwork is externalized. Isn’t the so-called schizophrenic state of South Korean society a cycle of this: life is bound and dragged around by events only to eventually disappear into oblivion, and a piece of that life reappears in an unexpected form at an unexpected place, either assaulting someone or left not even noticed? What I experienced and absorbed as a young person was not only the events themselves that struck Korean society, but also the question of whether I could withstand the accompanying gloom and the ridiculousness of not belonging anywhere.
After returning to Korea from Germany in 1997, I participated in a group called Forum A and contributed to its publication at the suggestion of few artists I was acquainted with. I also witnessed the activities of Alternative Space Pool, which opened in 1999, from a close distance. During this time, I was able to reconsider the meaning of artistic activities that addressed the socio-historical events and reality that deeply affected me from a different angle.¹² However, I thought it was only natural that the meaning of that time would flow differently afterward.

Faceless Bodies, Objects That Are Not Bodies

Kim
In 1989, you moved to Stuttgart, Germany, and lived between there and Korea until 1996, before returning permanently to Korea in 1997. 1989 is immediately after the 1988 Seoul Olympics; as a Korean woman having become an adult in the particular social state of Korea from when you were born in the 1960s to the 1990s, you may have felt a sense of foreignness.

Chung
In contrast to Korean colleges, the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart had a flexible curriculum that centered around the studio of the professor chosen by the student. Students were responsible for determining their own course of study, and professors would visit them about once a month for individual discussions. At times, we worked on projects with other students in the same studio. It was a frightening and intensive period in which I had to figure out each of my paths and confront myself.
Observing Germany, a country referred to as advanced, I was struck by the combination of individual independence and strict adherence to social norms. On the other hand, the slower, predictable pace of life also allowed me to pay more attention to the intricate relations I have with the world. At school or within the student community, I did not have to worry about my gender or racial identity, but in everyday life outside of school, I often encountered some gazes for which the reasons were obvious, and had to fiercely fight against them. I also witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. After this, I traveled to East Berlin and Dresden, where bullet holes from World War II were still visible everywhere. These places were calmer than Korea, but still had a sense of heavy, consistent pressure.
During my vacations, to earn money I worked at a factory that made mechanical parts. I was impressed by how the workers who had been performing mechanical, repetitive labor for decades maintained regular patterns of behavior even outside of work. Because I was a temporary worker, I was able to be in the position of an observer, and I noticed their unique body shapes and behavioral patterns. I still remember clearly how the gradual curves of the bodies moved in various ways to eventually connect with each other, and people waiting for the train in the early morning darkness – if they couldn’t stand in their usual spot, they would express anxiety by simultaneously moving in a similar intensity and speed, until they each found their place and were able to keep an appropriate distance from each other. I also think the shape of my own body changed while working at the factory.

Kim
That reminds me of your reluctance to draw people.

Chung
Although I do draw people occasionally, I rarely include their faces. I find it difficult to depict the human body because it is such a tangible and concrete fact. Doesn’t everyone already know what a body looks like? For the whole four years at the sculpture department in Korea, it was mandatory to model human bodies – ranging from the head to the entire body – with clay. While I was able to understand the body as a connected structural form, I had no talent in translating that into sculpture. Whenever I tried to recreate what I saw, there were too many details to consider, and I would fixate on certain parts and forget what I had seen before. The interconnected structure of a body is both a defined rule and a mischievous subject, and I cannot help but often feel foolish while working with it.

Kim
In 1991, you created an introspective work entitled I Am Happy. We Are Happy (2004) by Mo Bahc, exhibited at the 2004 Busan Biennale, is well known as his last work. Although the two pieces are quite different and were created more than a decade apart, they do share similar syntax in their titles. What are your thoughts on Bahc’s work?

Chung
I believe that the two works have different origins. I created the small piece I Am Happy in 1991 because, throughout my education and artistic practice in Korea, I never thought about how and where the concept of “I” was in my work, nor did I discuss it with anyone. I also believed that the self was not something to be expressed. Whenever I tried to express myself, I was thrown out of the moment. Looking back, 1991 was two years after I started living in Germany and I was going through significant changes and conflicts internally. In the midst of that, I tried to find a way to bring the “me” out of myself and this work was a result of that process. I see Bahc’s We Are Happy as an ironic and satirical statement about the relationship between society and the individual, expressing both a wish and cynicism born out of despair.

Part II. On Sculpture

Socializing and Silence, Yeomhwamiso, and Wretched Eloquence

Kim 
You probably experienced gatherings in the Korean art scene that were similar to those you saw as a child when people would frequent your poet father’s house from dawn until late at night, drinking and talking. At the time, it was more common in Germany to hold exhibition openings, dinners, and parties rather than Korean-style house gatherings, and the rules of socializing may have been unfamiliar to you. Through socializing, networking and discourse often occur among artists, and the content and permanence of works as well as art collections and their passing of knowledge can be influenced. At the 7th Gwangju Biennale in 2008, in which we both participated, art director Okwui Enwezor invited the artists – all pressed for time to finish installing – to join him for dinner. None of the Korean artists attended, perhaps in a display of a culture that strictly separates the artwork from other external matters.

Chung
I found the type of socializing that you described very difficult and awkward when I was in Germany, and it is still the case now. How does one socialize for work? I guess it could be a natural part of the process of working as an artist, but I have not personally experienced the connection between my work and parties, interchanges, and networking, in a way that might lead to meeting more people and becoming more active as a result. This is due to my personality. Maybe I become so exhausted after finishing my work that I enter an oblivious state. I don’t know how to reduce the complex path of my work into words. But this is more so because I am not good at using impressive language to describe my work and persuade people, not because I strictly separate my artwork from the external.

Kim
The title is very important in some of your works. The phonemes that make up the sentence or phrase serving as the title, and words that become other words through their syntactic relationships, are all related to the works. This reminds me of Yeomhwamiso – an act of conveying meaning without words, a kind of performance later documented as a four-character idiom that shows the relationship between an object and its title.¹³ An essential concept in this context is silence(沈黙). Can you talk about how the sensibility of silence affects your work process?

Chung
Between “silence” and “Yeomhwamiso,” I want to focus on the first word for now. The language I use in my titles is often not descriptive of the artwork or its subject. Some people find these titles difficult and convoluted, making the work less accessible, while on the contrary others think that they provide numerous entry points. When a word appears in the world, I believe that it comes with an invisible space that operates with the word. The word is in the foreground, and the space is perceptible. This becomes clear through silence. Although it is hardly believable, I am just reminded of a story some musicians have told me: if you enter a perfectly soundproof room, you can hear the blood circulating in your body.
I have been thinking recently about the banal fact that sculpture usually stands still. My practice involves making stubborn choices about the many problems I face until the work can stand still. I used to try to make the acuteness of those choices as visible as possible. Now, I prefer the work not to prominently display this inevitable process. That means I also have to change my understanding of the meticulous process as well. However, “Yeomhwamiso” sounds too perfect, like it will be forever beautiful, leaving no room for any words. The sensibility of silence that affects me is often momentary; it has less to do with the absence of words and more with facing an inevitable state.
These days, I often use the expression “wretched eloquence.” I hear people in the art community as well as the viewers say things all the time that are simply well-meant, with no room for questions. I often feel that all the righteous rhetoric is phony. Life is crappier often than not, so what good are an artist’s righteous words with predetermined purposes? I try to reflect on my own words to make sure I am not doing the same thing.

Kim
The silence in our conversation does not seem to mean the English word “silence.” If we translate the context in which we are using the word to the common meaning of “silence,” this conversation in an anglophone culture becomes another wretched eloquence that you just described. Especially since the word “silence” is such a cliché within non-Korean discourses that address Korean art and artists. Could you speak about some other aspects of the specific silence you mentioned?

Chung
If someone is able to encounter and remember a still sculpture, it is not because the sculpture is worthy of knowing, but because a specific silence has helped them concentrate on the sculpture; ultimately, it is because the silence has helped that someone focus on themselves.
One thing that I struggle with both in terms of execution and understanding is the number of times I have to explain myself in order to prove my existence. My being here in the present is intense enough, and I often do not know what else I need to add.

Kim
Could we say that silence serves as a form of protection, like a house? A house is still, creating a space where one is protected from the rain. However, a house does not exist to stop the rain. Therefore, a house does not avoid the rain or remove it, but the space inside is protected. It simply exists; but if we were to twist this a bit and turn it into another wretched eloquence, we could even argue that the house resists the rain.

Chung
What would be this silence protecting?

Kim
The place. Where silence itself stays still.

Chung
The silence I am now thinking about contains something inside it, but what is inside might have already been dissolved and blended into silence, or sometimes you might be able to perceive what is outside the silence. The word “protect” makes it sound like the silence and the object of silence are clearly distinguishable.

Kim
Rather than the silence protecting something else, isn’t the silence the protection of silence, just like how silence occupies a place? For example, I am thinking about the occupancy in which the kind of writing that once rings a vocal cord and then again just about once resonates the profound yet fragile medium of memory – like the ink writing on paper in Monster Map, 15 min. (2008) – permeates a ceramic object in A Hole (2020) and is placed on a sturdy pedestal.

Chung
When it comes to showing my work in a lucid and realistic condition such as an exhibition, the choices I make about how to classify and hone in are very important. I’m not sure how directly this relates to your question of occupancy, but in addition to the ceramic work A Hole, which you mentioned, there are many of my works of which the material and structure are not stable or several parts are temporarily put together to make a piece. Some of these works have disappeared after the exhibition; for others, I have had to design a documenting device so that they can be installed again exactly as they were done previously. When others had installed the work using only the documentation photos without me or the device, the work ended up in an awkward state, unable to find its place. This is a big dilemma that accompanies my practice, but also an indication of a crucial element of my works. The process of finding the place for my sculpture so that it is clearly articulated is important both for the sculpture itself and for installing it in the exhibition space. At the end of the day, this is something that only I can do and there is no way to prevent an omission when I am not present. Oh well, it is what it is. Anyway, my sculptures usually sit still and, when they do, silence is important. Because the exhibition is where the definitive position of an artwork is revealed. So yes, silence provides a place for silence.
Regarding the silence in question, I recall the phrase “dwelling inside the subject” that you brought up in Hair is a piece of head (2021).¹⁴ I’m not sure if I understood it correctly, but what came to mind when I read it was the position of the work, the position of the artist within the work, the relationship between the work and the artist, as well as the relationship of the work with all the conditions surrounding it.
For quite some time, I have often been confused after seeing an exhibition or their documentation images because of the absence of the artist in some works, or the absence of the work within the subject of the work. “Dwelling inside the subject” is very difficult; its unique temporality seems unattainable without the silence protecting silence.

Kim
In the roundtable discussion held on the first day of your retrospective What I Saw Today (2022) at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), curator Chus Martínez discussed the DNA of materials in relation to your work.¹⁵ While the objectivity and universality of DNA is interesting, and this interview has somewhat shared that point of view, I find the uniqueness of materials and how they document the unpredictable changes occurring in a specific time and space to be more intriguing. The titles of your works and exhibitions, such as The Time Is Now (2012) and What I Saw Today, suggest that the objects are singular in some ways, but they also represent the situating of objects that existed in the past and still exist today. The Time Is Now seems to refer to two points in time, but it is unclear which “now” or what “time” is being referred to, allowing for multiple interpretations.
Time flows into the space occupied by objects, like when you give a tap on a still object so it moves. A day called today has always existed for everyone everyday, scattered in different places. If we extend now and then [the Time], we get a directional vector space. Similarly, there is seemingly a motion of transformation within the place called silence. For example, the letter [the Korean character 어] painted in your 1996 work -Awe is a vowel sound, in between meanings. “어” is a vowel: it is the sound you make when you can’t find the next word; it is a word trying to become an important meaning; it is an intermediate sound in transition from one meaning to another. You had mentioned that you remember art as “images exchanged in a rough state” during your art education. Is -Awe a very rough state, but not an image?

Chung
Using language to express thoughts about art is a perplexing task. Even when discussing literature. This dilemma can be either a friend or an obstructor. What I remember the most about my art education in Korea is trying to guess and understand what the instructor was conveying using abstract language, without any real interaction or discussion. That’s what I meant by “images exchanged in a rough state.”
The idea of the transformative motion between meanings reminds me of the plural realities or worlds derived from a single work that overlap and rupture.

Kim
I think an object relates to transformation, not because of hindrance in which historic spectacles like the division of Korea or nostalgic description of one’s hometown is broached – but because an object is made when the specificities of the “then” and “here” are collapsed, edited, and reborn. To fully understand this transformation, it is necessary to record and remind the specificities of various time periods and experiences.
Works like Wave (1998) and Corner Stone (2006–2011) illustrate this concept by showing a form being changed into another form that appears to be identical but is actually different. Once stone becomes a stone column, we no longer see the stone itself, but instead start to see the column and its style. Like in cinema, a different time than “now” connects to the place occupied by an object, giving the object another story than merely one of its form. For example, in Wave, the artist’s perspective sees the wave as a single mass rather than a panoramic wave with its large movement. As a viewer, I can imagine the artist’s many experiences that led her to see the wave in this way, as well as the many other ways in which a wave could be depicted.
Lookout (1999) is an enlarged version of a small image on a postcard, but it is not in the exact scale of the actual lookout. However, my sense – a kind of a prejudice – that the work looks a little bit small cannot be determined just by looking at the documentation image. It is only possible when my body encounters the object.

Chung
When I was making Lookout and Gatehouse (2000), another work from around that time, I wanted a scale that was clearly noticeable but did not fit within any particular context. In my sculpture, scale is a crucial component, as it is a medium-specific issue that cannot be fully addressed through images. In the end, I need to choose one of many attempts at situating the sculpture in real space. One of the constraints is the scale, which is an open-ended question in all 360 degrees; I spend a lot of time making this decision. I spend less time deciding what to make and more time deciding its size and physical constraints. To me, this is a unique temporality of sculpture. Determining the scale is also a complex process, as it involves many factors such as material, emotion, personal and social memories, and the relationships between all the elements of the artwork. Scale also relates to the particularity of experience, as you described earlier.
Many of my works have titles that include the word “vs.” between two words that do not typically go together. Sometimes these words are entangled within a single domain [Finger vs. Fist, 2014; Apple vs. Banana, 2011], and other times their relationship is not obvious at all [Ability vs. Invisibility, 2017]. The “vs.” serves as a condition that highlights the issue of experience’s particularity and conveys the thought process behind my work, though I wonder if someone would be able to understand its role.

Sung Hwan Kim uses film and video, drawing, architecture, and literature, as well as his own writing, as part of his installations, performances, radio plays, and books. Kim has recently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2021), the 13th Gwangju Biennale (2021), the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Gwacheon, Korea, 2019), DAAD Galerie (Berlin, 2018), the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (United Kingdom, 2017). His publications include Talk or Sing (Hyunsil Munhwa, 2014), Ki-da Rilke (Sternberg Press and Kunsthalle Basel, 2011), and When Things Are Done Again (Tranzitdisplay, 2010).