Soun-Gui Kim: Lazy Clouds

With the exhibition Soun-Gui Kim: Lazy Clouds, the ZKM presents the first comprehensive solo exhibition of Korean-French artist Soun-Gui Kim in Europe. The retrospective provides an overview of her work from the 1970s until today, ranging from the deconstruction of painting to performance, photography, film, video, and multimedia. In this diversity of media, temporality, the random, the processual and situational, interaction and participation, the playful, as well as the examination of one's own existence, of language and poetry, represent the unifying aspects that run as threads through the artist’s entire oeuvre and thus also through the exhibition.

The exhibition title Lazy Clouds refers to a poem as well as a book of poems by the artist published in France. At the same time, it is as an example of her personal approach to life. Completely contrary to the prevailing capitalist-oriented productivity and performance regime, it is based on the concept of leisure as an artistic, creative, and philosophical principle. Like the clouds, that are completely free to find ever new forms in the sky, Soun-Gui Kim devotes herself to her art, far away from predefined patterns and conventions.

Kim’s artistic practice is influenced by comparative studies of Eastern and Western culture, which can also be traced back to her biography. She spent her youth in Korea, where she completed her art studies at Seoul National University in 1971. A scholarship from the French government then took her to the south of France where she worked and became acquainted with the avant-garde movements of the time. There, in the early 1970s, she created Situation Plastique I–III, a series of large-scale installations and performances in public spaces in which hundreds of people participated, outside of museum and art-specific contexts. A few years later, in 1974, she received her first professorships at the École Nationale d’Art Décoratif in Nice and the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Marseille. Further appointments followed, including a guest professorship at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg [HFBK University of Fine Arts of Hamburg] (1985).

Her many visits to various countries around the world deepened her engagement with the culture and art of the East and West. In New York, for example, she associated with renowned video artists such as Nam June Paik, Ko Nakajima, Ira Schneider, and Frank Gillette. In 1986 she organized the festival Video & Multimedia: Soun-Gui Kim and Her Invitees in Marseille, at which Nam June Paik, John Cage and others participated. This is a further confirmation of her intense interest in participatory and discursive programs, which was already evident at the Soun-Gui Kim Art Festival held in Seoul in 1975. Time and again Kim explores the meaning and essence of art, especially contemporary art, and its position within global, capitalist society. This was also the case in the artist’s conversations with French philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida. Since the late 1980s, questions related to the spread of global capitalism and the structural changes in society brought about by the Internet have become increasingly important for her.

Today, the artist lives and works in the countryside near Paris, where, in harmony with nature and her surroundings, she devotes herself to her art projects that combine philosophy, art, and technology. The exhibition at the ZKM invites visitors to immerse themselves in Soun-Gui Kim’s multifaceted oeuvre and (intellectual) world, and experience global lines of development in media art made possible by her intensive engagement with Western and Eastern culture.

The exhibition at the ZKM is realized in collaboration with the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), where the retrospective Soun-Gui Kim: Lazy Clouds was on view in 2019, and the Arario Gallery, both located in Seoul, South Korea.

Curated by Clara Runge, Soojung Yi, and Philipp Ziegler.

Please find further information here.