서울시립미술관 SEOUL MUSEUM OF ART

Ua a‘o ‘ia ‘o ia e ia 우아 아오 이아 오 이아 에 이아
They learned from them. learned, by them, their teaching

There are many different ways of experiencing an exhibition. I myself have likened it to the experience of seeing a stranger weeping. We often see strangers smiling, but because it is rare to see a person in tears, the impact is that much greater. When we witness someone crying, we suddenly become cognizant of the very obvious fact that the life they are living is entirely separate from our own. Exhibitions are similar in that they, too, provide us with an opportunity to perceive the everyday―or simply, that which we already know―differently. The moment we enter an exhibition, we enter a world created by the mind and gaze of another person (the artist). By inserting our own bodies and axes of thought into this world constructed by the artist, we encounter new sensations and ideas. And as part of this process, we may each examine, adjust, and even rebuild our own worlds. Exhibitions are a vital medium for engaging our thinking and knowing, and the experience is unique to each one of us. Building on such properties, theorist and curator Irit Rogoff refers to exhibitions as spaces where “events of knowledge” take place.

Organized under the auspices of an annual exhibition series highlighting contemporary Korean artists, Ua a‘o ‘ia ‘o ia e ia 우아 아오 이아 오 이아 에 이아, a solo exhibition by Sung Hwan Kim, invites viewers to become witnesses and agencies of the very sites where such events of knowledge occur, spread, and are manifested as praxis. At the center of the exhibition is A Record of Drifting Across the Sea, a multi-part research work the artist has been delving into since 2017. Beginning with the stories of early 20th century Korean immigrants to the United States who passed through Hawai‘i, A Record of Drifting Across the Sea expands these narratives to include issues of boundaries, tradition, documentation, and its possession and circulation, among others. Kim zeroes in on the fact that despite being situated within the larger historical narrative of modernity and colonization, the lives of many of these early immigrants have never been properly addressed in the prevailing historical narratives of Korea or the U.S. In following these lives that exist outside more widely established narratives, the artist is taking a multivalent approach to addressing the issues that surround acts of knowledge by taking stories from either side of various boundaries and weaving them together. By the same token, he also explores how systems of knowledge work to shape an individual’s thinking and gaze.

Here, Hawai‘i is both a concept and a specific geographic location. Beginning in the mid-19th century, with the flourishing of large-scale industrial plantations, countless overseas laborers were introduced to Hawai‘i; Chinese immigrants were followed by an influx from Japan, and then Korea, each wave shaped by the flow of capital and shifting immigration laws. The first officially documented Korean migrants were the 120 or so individuals who left Incheon Harbor in 1902, holding passports issued by the Korean Empire and arriving in Hawai‘i in 1903. This marked a turning point after which many Koreans came to settle in the mainland US via Hawai‘i. At the time, Hawai‘i was home to many who found themselves adrift, whether migrant workers hailing from Korea and elsewhere, refugees fleeing war, or native Hawaiians who had lost their ‘āina (land) when it was forcibly annexed by the United States in 1898. Even as Hawai‘i is a concrete place where lives and cultures drift across ethnic and regional boundaries, it is also a conceptual location in which we can examine the dynamics of the various forces in play all the way through to the present day. As a metaphor, Hawai‘i serves as the chosen site for the questioning of existing knowledge systems, intersecting them with different systems of knowing, and constructing entirely new structures of knowledge. This exhibition unpacks the ways in which the knowledge is formed and disseminated, right alongside the traces that have long been relegated to the margins of such recorded history, proposing Hawai‘i as a lens through which we might consider the whole without sacrificing complexity.

Unthreading (parfiler*)

The genesis of this exhibition began with looking over the artist’s ways of thinking. Visitors to Sung Hwan Kim’s website will come across Lessons of 1896–1907 (2018–), a collection of research materials collected by the artist over the past several years while working on A Record of Drifting Across the Sea. Much of this material is rooted in the artist’s own life in Hawai‘i, as well as a journey he undertook toward the beginning of the project, driving across the western United States to visit various places once settled by early Korean immigrants, seeing, hearing, and collecting traces of the past in an attempt to touch their lives. In 2020, Kim relocated to Hawai‘i, effectively placing himself within the place of his research. The thoughts and experiences produced during this process have been categorized into eleven segmented lessons and made available on the website. These lessons are quite varied, consisting of images and texts collected and photographed by the artist, passages from books he read and excerpts from movies he watched. While these lessons may seem, at first, like straightforward products of ordinary research, they go beyond the simple collection of information to explore ways of approaching complex and knotty subject matter. By carefully unthreading the strands of the tangled object, one is able to draw out the problem and continue thinking it over, educating oneself along the way. Lesson 2, for example, titled Surviving Moments, shows multiple versions of a scene from Chūshingura, a tale that has been retold in Japan since the 18th century. Alongside this, different elements like archival records of Gwanghwamun’s many transformations from the 1900s to the present day and movie scenes depicting structures in flames are woven together to show what has survived and what has been lost in the stream of history. Looking at these objects, we ask what we ought to consider in what is shared across that which has been left behind. Lessons is more than just a mere repository for background research and information gathered to make A Record of Drifting Across the Sea. Rather, it is a clue to which exact aspect of reality the artist seeks to illuminate and problematize with A Record of Drifting Across the Sea, offering insight into his own systems of knowing, his specific point of view, and how he is handling all of the above.

Ua a‘o ‘ia ‘o ia e ia 우아 아오 이아 오 이아 에 이아 is an exhibition that hopes to capture the artist’s own experiences of witnessing and knowing in the wake of his relocation to Hawai‘i and transmit them as “events of knowledge” for the viewers. These are things that cannot be sensed unless one actually moves one’s body, experiencing directly. As such, the exhibition functions like a live Lesson itself, emphasizing the relationship between the displayed information and the viewing body as it invites a formation of knowledge through various senses. Like the artist himself, we approach the subject matter as if unthreading the intricately tangled fabric of space-time along a multi-directional axis of knowledge.

The exhibition itself opens with the task of looking at Hawai‘i anew. We begin by examining why A Record of Drifting Across the Sea, a piece that deals with issues of the knowledge system, takes Hawai‘i as its main setting. In doing so, the many different techniques of editing―including quotation, excerpt, juxtaposition, imitation, transformation, and reconstitution―and translation as metaphor emerge both as integral parts of the artist’s primary praxis and as recurring elements threaded throughout the exhibition, which deals with the formation and proliferation of knowledge. Now here, let us return to the title of the exhibition: Ua a‘o ‘ia ‘o ia e ia 우아 아오 이아 오 이아 에 이아. Its meaning opaque without further explanation, this title intentionally juxtaposes Hawaiian and Korean phonetics without any mediating language, creating a delay in interpretation that resists immediate access and thereby opening up a space for thought―and the production of layered meaning. According to the artist, “We can also carry meanings from one place to another by highlighting the similar elements between the two through metaphor. It is insightful to juxtapose two cultures through cross-analogy rather than through excavation or translation. One can be the metaphor of the other, and vice versa.” In this way, what the title seeks to assert is a way of thinking about its object, emphasizing that the exhibition is not about a specific history but rather about how to approach object (history) writ large.

The exhibition unfolds across three rooms. Starting with migration narratives that unpack modern and colonial histories, we move on to the ways in which this object (history) has been handled, fleshing out questions around the formation, ownership, and distribution of the knowledge surrounding it as we progress from one room to the next.

In Room 1, Hawai‘i is given form by Figure Complex (2024) and reconstitutions of an exhibition curated by Drew Kahu‘āina Broderick for the Hawai‘i Triennial 2022. Here we see a number of figures and the circumstances of the time periods in which they lived, from the early 20th century to the present day. If these seemingly unrelated images and texts have one thing in common, it is that they are all connected to Hawai‘i. Using Hawai‘i as the center, the artist weaves together disparate regions, times, cultures, historical events, and people, both longitudinally and transversely, presenting Hawai‘i as a space of complex and varied overlapping perspectives. Taking in Sung Hwan Kim’s newly illuminated Hawai‘i as both place and as concept, we gradually begin to uncover how events and lives beyond our own seemingly unrelated borders (or systems) actually relate back to us as well. And within this process, the artist suggests thinking about such phenomena and objects, navigating the complex relationships that lie beyond the systems of knowledge to which we already belong.

Room 2 brings our attention to the relationship between “body and information” by presenting art as a process through which knowledge is generated. Planning to be in residence here for the duration of the exhibition, the artist will create an artwork via variations on different extant elements of the exhibition, including video fragments, sounds, and other materials. This room, then, becomes both an exhibition space and the artist’s editing room or studio, presenting this process as a work in its own right. This shifting grammar of the exhibition constantly moves our axis of knowledge, proposing new “events of knowledge” for visitors to witness. At the same time, the artist finds himself producing his work in conversation with the visitors, observing their movements and reactions as they enter the space. The visitor, then, goes from being the viewer of a finished scene to being a witness to the process of one individual’s (the artist’s) thought being shaped into knowledge (the work), while also being an agency, involved in the creative process. In Room 2, the properties of the exhibition as a medium for generating and spreading knowledge, as well as the process therein, constitute the main thrust of the work on display; as such, Room 2 functions as a metaphor for the nature of knowledge in flux, shaped by the structural experimentation of the exhibition, even as it questions the way in which that knowledge―which we call “history”―is formed. The grammar of the exhibition, which maximizes the relationship between body and information, reveals the possibility of a new kind of knowledge that can only be accessed when the axis of knowledge is shifted (when the body moves).

Room 3 presents an installation that reimagines the 2007 video work Summer Days in Keijo―written in 1937 by adding documented images, and movie footage of arson and Gwanghwamun. The installation, which spans the whole exhibition space, shows what was lost and what remains across three time periods: 1937, 2007, and 2024. Designed to continuously oscillate between what was recorded and the reality transformed by jumps in time, the exhibition speaks to the transformation and disappearance that inevitably occurs over time (history) through the duality of recording and distortion inherent to mediums like exhibition and film. This attempt, on the part of the artist, to revitalize works completed in the past by bringing them into the present also represents his ongoing use of imitation and transformation to question our ever-changing knowledge. And this, in turn, reminds us once more that for Sung Hwan Kim, an “artwork” is not the result of a fixed thought about an object, but rather the gaze that approaches a changing object, and a way of thinking.

Witness is a Mode of Knowledge Exchange

It happened last summer, during a visit to Hawai‘i. I had the chance to visit some, if not all, of the locations that appear in A Record of Drifting Across the Sea, and even meet some of the individuals involved. The experience of physically moving through the real world created a space in which I could reflect on the objects I had previously encountered in archival form, or as a work by the artist, in relation to my own experience. When I realized after the fact that a building named “Younghee” I had stumbled across after a wrong turn had once been home to a number of early Korean immigrants, and when I realized that the road I’d just passed was one of the areas slated for redevelopment I’d seen in the Piliāmo‘o series, a wave of other temporalities and narratives that I had come to know through Kim’s work began rushing in, creating new and different landscapes. This journey, which allowed me the opportunity to trace my fingers along invisible times and people and lives, was also an experience where those things shown to me by the artist’s work came to life as my own. Easily the most transformative event of the trip, for me, was a keynote lecture by Dr. Manulani Aluli Meyer given as a precursor to the Hawai‘i Triennial 2025, in which the important Hawaiian philosopher and educator interpreted the Triennial’s theme of “ALOHA NŌ” on many different levels, drawing from her own lived experience. Claiming aloha as the source of all values, Dr. Aluli Meyer spoke of decolonizing knowledge, explaining that while Western philosophy and science would have us believe that the world is controlled by humanity, in reality, “the world is self-organizing, and because it is self-organizing, witnessing then becomes a higher frequency of knowledge exchange.” The biggest realization this sentence bestowed upon me concerns how to conceive of the act of witness. Before this, witnessing, for me, had been more of a passive experience, as in simply watching an event or situation unfold. What Dr. Aluli Meyer spoke of, however, was witness as an act of knowledge exchange. What is more, she helped me to see that witness is not encompassed in any one individual experience; rather, it is an active experience, shared with others―and when many such acts come together, they can even form a kind of collective knowledge.

Ua a‘o ‘ia ‘o ia e ia 우아 아오 이아 오 이아 에 이아, too, seeks to address issues of knowledge through this experience of active “witness.” Starting from the artist’s own questions and journey, the exhibition has itself undergone several transformations and edits as it made its way to you. And indeed, we plan for these processes of exchange and transformation to continue throughout the exhibition. Upon this fluid, floating ground, the artist’s journey and gaze will be followed by the curator, and this, in turn, followed by your own, creating a chain of witness upon witness within which we might find the opportunity to reflect upon what, exactly, is at work in our knowing, and how we might approach it. This is, at least, our hope.

* This was borrowed from an excerpt in Neutral by Roland Barthes that appears under the “intent” section of the Lessons.