Minae Kim on creating a ‘ludicrous sculptural sitcom’

A selection of Korea's most exciting contemporary artists have been selected for this year's Korean Artists Today, a long-term project which will see a cohort of artists chosen each year for their potential to make it on the global stage. See the full list here.

Minae Kim creates site-specific installations and sculptures that come together to create what she describes as a “ludicrous sculptural sitcom” which reveals the “small and large frustrations and contradictions that individuals face in the reality of life”, she tells The Art Newspaper.

Kim earned an MA in sculpture from the Royal College of Art in London in 2011, and previously completed an MFA at the Graduate School of Seoul National University in 2007. She is now based in Seoul but previously lived and worked between there and London for nearly a decade. As a foreign student and artist, Kim recalls that what had been familiar in Seoul was unfamiliar in London, which contributed to a “shift in perception” that helped shape her approach and investigation into meaning and abstraction.

“I think the experience of abstracting language [in particular] greatly influenced the visualisation of my work in many ways at that time,” Kim says. “Using a language that is not your mother tongue means that, even if you can use technical aspects of the language, you cannot fully understand its cultural context and nuances.”

During these formative years, Kim says she also began to select her materials specifically in response to the setting of the projects. She values the “semiotic process that occurs when everyday objects, evocative scenes and their narratives are combined with the spatial context of the exhibition space, where the function of the everyday object is subverted and reality and art are layered and amplified”.

Kim has exhibited her work internationally in solo and group exhibitions including at the Atelier Hermès in Seoul, the Doosan Gallery in New York, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts and HADA Contemporary in London. She has also earned several major awards, including the Doosan Yongang Artist Award in 2013 and Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2011. Kim reached widespread acclaim as a finalist for the prestigious 2020 Korea Artist Prize.

Kim describes her process as flexible, and she “never works at regular, fixed hours”, noting the challenges of balancing personal commitments and concentrating on the work. She says her studio serves as “something between an office and a warehouse”, where she takes time to collect her thoughts for her next projects. “I sit, think, read, write, scribble, draw, build, dismantle, surf the internet, make phone calls, take naps and listen to music there.”

Her method means that Kim’s work also never ends in the studio, but is completed by the tension between the pieces and the spaces in which they
are shown, which is undetermined until the end of the installation process. Although she works with a pre-planned design, there are unexpected variables that influence the final presentation, which become part of the work.

Like a lot of art, Kim’s work always has some autobiographical starting points, but the results interweave her memories with the multi-layered context of the exhibition space. “My experiences are based on a sense of commonality,” she says. “I have always been interested in the spatiality and temporality that the medium of sculpture deals with, so my work is often accompanied by reflections on past work, whether physical or symbolic.”