Seo-Seoul Museum of Art
Solo Exhibition of Media Artist
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. These exhibitions will interpret artists’ artistic worlds from multiple angles, support the production of new works, and create artistic knowledge and forms.
The first media artist solo exhibition at the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art has invited Kim Heecheon, who has presented a critical perspective on the contemporary technological environment and visual culture. In contemporary society, physical systems have been datafied and connected to the digital environment, with the two ceaselessly renewing each other and reconstructing the world. 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. Created by intersecting language 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.
The sentence “The world has become a screen” 1 stated in Lifting Barbells (2015), Kim Heecheon’s first video work, expresses his view of the world. The artist states that, in a world that moves on the basis of images captured with the camera, the screen is no longer a medium reproducing reality but has turned into an environment producing reality and constructing the world and, in Every Smooth Thing through Mesher (2018), that, in the future, “the world reflected and captured by the screen will be the only world that we can perceive.” 2 Depicting a world and a cultural landscape mediated by the media in works such as Sleigh Ride Chill (2016), Home (2017), Every Smooth Thing through Mesher (2018), and Deep in the Forking Tanks (2019) on one hand, the artist has addressed in depth issues including actuality and virtuality, data and networks, the internalized screen, the resolution of the world, and consciousness and experience while intersecting multidimensional times and spaces. Going beyond the form of simply being represented in his works, diverse topics raised by the technological environment are used as technologies producing images and narratives within the structures of visual media and designed as processes for mediating us and the world we live in.
Showcasing the artist’s latest works, with a focus on those since 2023, this exhibition will present for the first time games, videos, and photographs commissioned and supported by the Seoul Museum of Art. Forming a spiritual series 3, CutterIII (2023) and Double Poser (2023) are autoplayed games made with a game engine Unity. As games rendered in real time through input values instead of recordings of screens replayed as videos, the two works are autoplayed. 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 4 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 ButterIII, a hypothetical video game whose main character is Butter, a mole. Here, the mole simultaneously has the attributes of a double spy going back and forth between two different game worlds and symbolizes the wish to break free from an environment captured by technology and is a being that shakes a self uniformly fixed by technology.
Individualized with the rise of smartphones, algorithms capture what a subject sees and reacts to, and systems once again intervene in what a subject sees and reacts to through interfaces mediated by technology.5 In a world where technology has become nonvisible because of the advancement of performance, a subject cannot perceive interfaces, and distances between systems and this subject disappear so that the subject is no longer able to distinguish between the world as mediated by technology and the world as the subject has experienced. Now, systems capture, model, and predict the subject on the level of the screen, and the subject, surrounded by experiences based on such artificial systems, comes to internalize modeled results repeatedly. Produced against such a backdrop, the artist’s new work Cured (2026), a multichannel video created with generative artificial intelligence (AI), 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.
.dng (2026), a photographic work presented for the first time through this exhibition, consists of some 100 photographs, selected for the occasion from 5,841 photographs taken by the artist with a mobile phone. Not fixed by a particular topic, the photographs on display harbor the flow of time and accidental and discontinuous experiences. 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.
Sungmin Lee Jeong (curator, Seoul Museum of Art)
1 Excerpted from the artist’s “Memo” (Oct. 2025).
2 Excerpted from a description of the worldview of Every Smooth Thing through Mesher in the artist’s “Memo” (Oct. 2025).
3 “A sequel that, though not directly linked to the background or the worldview of its predecessor, shares the predecessor’s elements wholesale is called a ‘spiritual successor’. As CutterIII is the spiritual successor to Double Poser, created later, I’ve arbitrarily named the two a ‘spiritual series’.” Refer to the artist’s “Mole 01 and Mole 02” (Feb. 2026).
4 A message or a function hidden in a program by developers, an Easter egg does not affect a game’s operation method or story development.
5 Refer to the artist’s “Preliminary memo on Cured” (May 2026).
