스킵네비게이션

Born 1988 in Seoul, South Korea

Lives in Seoul

 

KIM Heecheon, Deep in the Forking Tanks, 2019, Single channel video, color, sound, 42min

 

For the past five years, South Korean artist KIM Heecheon has produced, with a commanding zeal, an impressive volume of elaborative artworks using the tools of new media. Born in Seoul in 1989, KIM focuses on media art not by chance; he is a digital native. Meaning, he is part of a generation for which most analogue technologies are not only archaic, but entirely alien.

KIM’s works reveal an author whose consciousness unfastens. He desperately attempts to touch reality—a semi-autobiographical narrative unfolds—but with all the data at hand, the artist still hits an invisible barrier. The artist’s world is built upon the picture of data space. Trapped in the flat world of screens, where physical environments and mental unity are being fractured, the video trilogy reveals the artist’ deep investment in exploring the fluid boundaries between what constitutes “reality,” “fiction,” and the “virtual”; splits that both transform the artist’s perception and warp his sense of self. In his most recent video Deep in the Forking Tanks (2019), the artist pushes these ideas into a minimal crystallization. The work depicts the artist’s training in diving via simulation, with the aid of a flotation device, or what is called a “sensory deprivation tank.” In this work, the simulation—a physical manifestation of the cyberspace—enables one at first to be deprived of senses.