Kim Heecheon: Moles

The Seo-Seoul Museum of Art’s media artist solo exhibitions are the institution’s specially planned exhibitions that will focus on major contemporary South Korean media artists who have presented artistic perspectives on a dramatically changing society. 

The first media artist solo exhibition at the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art will be held as an invitational exhibition of works by Kim Heecheon, who has presented a critical perspective on the contemporary technological environment and visual culture. The artist has questioned how one can perceive one’s own being in a world where virtuality operates as one layer of reality and technology has become nonvisible. 

Showcasing the artist’s latest works, with a focus on those since 2023, Kim Heecheon: Moles will present for the first time games, videos, and photographs commissioned and supported by the Seoul Museum of Art. Forming a spiritual series, CutterIII (2023) and Double Poser (2023) are games created with spaces in the art museums where the works were placed as the backdrops and with the games’ operation methods themselves as the mainstay. Experimenting with whether or not a game engine can be used as a new moving image production tool, the artist deals with changing temporality in an informatized world by using the games’ temporal and spatial conditions and narratives. 

A new work, Lemon (2026) started from the imagination that the mole featured as an Easter egg in CutterIII and Double Poser dug a tunnel between the two works, secretly going back and forth between them. This work unfolds according to the game play of Butter III, a hypothetical video game whose main character is Butter, a mole. Here, the mole simultaneously symbolizes the wish to break free from an environment captured by technology and is a being that shakes a self uniformly fixed by technology.

Now, artificial intelligence (AI) has transcended the pattern of learning humans’ senses, language, and inferential ability, reaching a stage where humans, conversely, model and internalize AI systems. A multichannel video created with generative AI, the artist’s new work Cured (2026) addresses changes to be brought about to the world by the image ecosystem of the near future surrounding us and the ensuing changes in human perception and perspective.

Meanwhile, dng (2026) is composed of over 100 photographs selected from 5,841 pieces taken by the artist with a mobile phone since 2023. Recorded through the artist’s eye and by way of private narratives, these photographs capture within certain frames the relationship between the external world and the self living in the present.

Along with reflections on society and culture changing under the influence of the contemporary technological environment and media, this exhibition will provide an opportunity to ponder deeply on existence and perception, time and space, and technology and humanity. It has been constructed so as to allow viewers momentarily to break free from the surface of the Earth and to experience a sensory journey intersecting actuality and virtuality in a space that integrates the artificial environment of the art museum and the digital imagination of the works.

Curated by Sungmin Lee Jeong (Curator), with assistance from Soojeong PARK, Jiyoun Lee and Yoon Jung Won (Exhibition Coordinator). Organized by Seoul Museum of Art.