Installation view of 《Kim Heecheon: Moles》 © Seoul Museum of Art. Photo: Dongwoong Lee.
The Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) presents 《Kim Heecheon: Moles》, on view through November 8, at the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art, SeMA’s
branch dedicated to new media.
《Kim Heecheon: Moles》 inaugurates the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art’s Solo Exhibition of
Media Artist Series. For this inaugural exhibition, the museum has invited Kim
Heecheon, who brings a critical perspective on the contemporary technological
environment and visual culture.
Kim 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
invisible.
Created by intersecting languages and technologies from diverse
fields including video, game, architecture, cinema, and literature, his unique
works provide critical and aesthetic perspectives for us to reflect on
ourselves and to perceive and sense the world as we live in this era.
Installation view of 《Kim Heecheon: Moles》 © Seoul Museum of Art. Photo: Dongwoong Lee.
The exhibition, the first large-scale solo presentation devoted to
Kim Heecheon (b. 1989), brings together around 120 works made since 2023 across
games, video, and photography. Three works—Lemon (2026), Cured
(2026), and .dng (2026)—are newly commissioned by the museum
and presented here for the first time.
Lemon, commissioned and supported by the SeMA,
began with the imagination that the mole appearing as an Easter egg in Cutter
III (2023) and Double Poser (2023) had dug a
tunnel between the two works, secretly moving back and forth between them.
The work unfolds according to the gameplay of Butter III, a
hypothetical video game whose main character is Butter, a mole. In the work,
the “mole” symbolizes the wish to break free from an environment captured by
technology and is a being that shakes a self uniformly fixed by technology.
Installation view of 《Kim Heecheon: Moles》 © Seoul Museum of Art. Photo: Dongwoong Lee.
Cured, also commissioned and supported by the
Seoul Museum of Art, is a 4-channel video created with generative artificial
intelligence (AI). The work addresses the changes that the image ecosystem of
the near future surrounding us may bring to the world, as well as the ensuing
changes in human perception and perspective.
.dng
consists of some 120 photographs selected for this exhibition from 5,841
photographs 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.
The
exhibition offers an opportunity to reflect on a society and culture
transformed by contemporary technological environments and media, while
inviting deeper contemplation of existence and perception, time and space, and
technology and humanity.
