Dae Uk Kim

Lives and works in Eindhoven, Netherlands

Artist statement

I grew up in South Korea, learning to manage my own body. The way I spoke, moved, and carried myself was read as wrong, and the correction was physical and specific. My hair was kept short, and my voice, gestures, and walk were pointed out and disciplined until I held them still. What was done to me was a kind of manufacturing: society treated the body as a machine, something to be shaped into one fixed form and allowed only one set of movements. My work begins with the bodies that fall outside that mould, and makes the world that shaped them visible so that it can be seen again. The work comes from a single principle. I take something fixed into one function or one proper shape, and I bend, swell, and distort it until it can no longer hold that form. What comes out is a mutation. A mutation is not a failure of the original; it is the original refusing to stay in the form it was assigned, and in that refusal it gains a value it was never allowed to have. I carry this principle into nature, beginning from forms that are born outside the shape they are supposed to keep. I build these mutations in silicone and hair so that they read not as objects but as living beings, because the stories I tell through nature and society are finally stories about people. A viewer who meets these sculptures as living bodies can begin to recognize something of their own life in them.

Artwork