Christine Sun Kim: Have Many Dumb Fights Against Rock

MMCA×LG OLED Series is a mid-to-long-term partnership between the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) and LG Electronics that explores new possibilities in contemporary art. Each year, the project selects a single artist to present a newly commissioned site-specific work in Seoul Box, an iconic space at MMCA Seoul. Bringing together advanced display technology and artistic imagination, the series proposes a distinct mode of visual experience. 

MMCA×LG OLED Series 2026 presents Have Many Dumb Fights Against Rock by Christine Sun Kim. The exhibition introduces a large-scale digital animation alongside mural works that continues Kim’s ongoing inquiry into language and communication. The newly commissioned work actively engages both the architectural openness of Seoul Box and the spatial qualities of OLED display technology, expanding the artist’s critical perspective on contemporary modes of communication into an immersive spatial experience.

Christine Sun Kim is a Korean American artist based in Berlin. Working across drawing, mural, performance, video, and installation, Kim has explored the structures of perception and communication. Her work reveals how meaning is produced and transmitted within social conditions shaped by power, institutions, education, and media, while questioning the systems of language and communication often taken for granted. Through questions such as “What can be heard and spoken?” and “Who is allowed to express themselves, and who is excluded?,” she renders visible the conditions of communication and the power structures that underlie them, prompting a reconsideration of familiar communicative conventions.

The exhibition title, Have Many Dumb Fights Against Rock, evokes cycles of conflict and unproductive argumentation. Kim frames the polarization intensified by digital environments and online media as a sensation akin to “arguing endlessly with a rock.” Here, the “rock” refers not only to an unyielding other who insists on their position, but also to ourselves when we become confined within our own certainties and unable to compromise. More broadly, the rock signifies the entrenched structures that govern language and social relationships. Within a space where language and its visualized forms intersect and continually shift, viewers are invited to experience communication not as a fixed outcome but as an evolving process through which difference and relationships are continually reconfigured. In doing so, the exhibition invites reflection on new possibilities for communication that enable coexistence with others without erasing difference.