Through an experimental approach using drawing, sculpture, video and sound, Kim creates sculptural installations that alter meaning through a shift in perception. In doing so, the artist seeks to shake viewers out of a passive, anesthetized state into one that inspires active engagement with their surroundings. Kim explains, ”Sometimes ordinary acts of everyday life can acquire a different meaning through a new perception or relationship. This is what my works try to capture.” An example of this transformation may be seen in the sculptural light installation, “Active Anesthesia.” Commonplace American television commercials are projected onto one surface of the piece, while the light from the television is transformed via the aluminum grid into an interplay of abstracted light on the other side of the installation. Kim brilliantly converts the mundane “anesthetized” images of television into a dynamic, minimalist composition of light and movement.
The light installation, “Temporal Continuum Intuitively Known Élan vital Operates Emptiness,” which is Kim’s musing on the limitations of language to refer to things and emotions, can also be seen in the exhibition with the video “Persistency.”
Shin il Kim was honored with the Korea Artist Prize 2014 and an exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Gwacheon, Korea. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with SCAD.
