Junghun Kim

Interview by Joal Stein

An introduction to the work of Junghun Kim, in the form of 15 short notes:

Pre: The biographical facts are simple. Junghun Kim is a multidisciplinary artist born in South Korea and currently living in the Netherlands. Shortlisted for last year's Foundwork Artist Prize, he primarily works in sculpture and painting and received his MFA at the Piet Zwart Institute.

i. Sculpture is one materialization of breath. The artist shapes and carves, chisels, and molds breathing life into matter with every stroke of their tool. As we reckon with the existence of all forms of intelligence, we are beckoned to "remember the hand."

ii. Sculpture is not just the product of the sculptor's breath; it is also a container for the viewer's breath. As we stand before a sculpture, we become aware of our own breathing, of the air flowing in and out of our lungs, of the coexistence of our body and the sculpture's material form. In this way, sculpture is a meeting point for different kinds of breath, a place where the boundaries between self and other, subject and object, dissolve and reconfigure.

iii. John Berger often spoke of humanity’s ability to make its own world, to become the subject and not merely the victim of history. “The function of the work of art,” he once said, “is to lead us from the work to the process of creation which it contains.”

iv. Poetry is not just about words, but to touch the formlessness of the word, to become unfamiliar to ourselves. In any sense, the work of Junghun Kim is urgently poetic and spiritual, activating the five senses in order to make that which is not us, the nonhuman, newly intimate and familiar.

v. The painter must make their argument in negative space. To find what is not readily knowable by vision alone but can only be revealed by showing what is missing.

vi. In Junghun Kim’s work, categories dissolve and chase each other into uncertain disorder. By paying attention to the diverse ways of life that constitute worlds, a multiplicity of possible connections and understanding opens up: species are always many and plural, multiplying their forms and associations.

vii. How can an artist undo the world of objects, to render the act of ongoing creation of coexistence visible in non-vision?

viii. In the labor of the artist—the exchange of body, breath, matter, material, a coexistence of the world—an act of ongoing creation is at play.

ix. Junghun’s work is deeply sensual, as it emerges from the senses, leading us into overgrown edges, wild interstitially, and the radical unknowability of the world.

x. The marks in the work of Junghun Kim, whether in sculpture or painting, are gestures of nonlinear ecological causalities that remain hidden from anthropocentric vision. He resists commentaries and explanations, instead producing experiences for the activation of the senses.

xi. Soil is planetary. When you sense Junghun’s work, think of the soil, breathing.

xii. Breath is a collective act, something we have evolved with and into.

xiii. Wong May wrote, “a bird translates silence.”

xiv. Breath recites relation.

A one time breathing is a world, 2022

Porcelain, ceramic pigment

Photo by Steven Maybury

Joal Stein (JS): Hi Junghun. Where are you right now? Where have you been recently, and how is your breath today?

Junghun Kim (JK): My breath, first of all—I’m quite stable today. Sometimes your breath, your heartbeat, and your spirit can be unstable. But I think I’m good. Recently, I was around Lauterbrunnen in Switzerland. There are no mountains or untouched natural forests in the Netherlands. I really missed being in a healthy and diverse nature with other animals. So I feel good after spending a week in the mountains.

JS: Did you grow up around mountains or in an environment with a lot of nature?

JK: I don't know if you've been to Korea, but I grew up in Gyeongju. It's an ancient Buddhist town. I grew up on the mountain there and in Jeju Island around the seaside. Living and growing up on the mountain helped my imagination and opened my five senses. By witnessing other animals' behaviors, communities, and networks, I saw how non-human communities can be broken by unconscious human activities or technologies. So yeah, I think growing up on the mountain was a big influence in my life as an artist. It was very peaceful and I appreciated it so much. My parents are both artists, too.

JS: You describe the experience of being immersed in nature and noticing non-human things, noticing how things grow or decompose, and the texture and materiality of things. In your development, as a person first and then as an artist, did you have a sense of the interconnection between the craft of making, of texture and materials in the studio, with that of the natural world?

JK: Being on the mountain, in nature, was more than material or artistic creation. It helped me to have some alter-consciousness, on the mountain with so many... Look, I had eight dogs.

That really shaped my consciousness and unconsciousness. I started my meditation practice when I was around four or five years old, while being on the mountain alone. I learned to hear deeper sounds, water, plants. It started with me being attuned to what was around me; I didn't know it was a meditation at the time, but now I could say it was a sort of meditation. Nature taught me how to concentrate.

Geological meditation series (workshop view), 2021-22

Ceramic, natural objects, fruits, vegetables, plants, and acrylic on recycled panels

Photo by Maria Jose Crespo

JS: You have an ongoing, connected series of works on geological meditation. I love that term. Could describe the genesis and evolution of that: how that practice began, and how it's been evolving in your work?

JK: I started actively meditating with a renewed focus in 2017, and at that time I was collecting all sorts of stones, branches, and natural objects from nature. I started to sit with them. I realized that all these large and small natural objects could help my imagination and meditation process.

By understanding the dynamics of reproduction, the balance and coexistence between all living things support us. Each small particle of every natural object helps me go deeper into my imagination and meditation.

Training my imagination and my meditation has made them more dynamic and sympathetic. Each time we see one stone, we can connect to many places, to the memory of seeds, the memory of stones. Many poetic and imaginative and fictional narratives arise from that.

"Training my imagination and my meditation has made them more dynamic and sympathetic. Each time we see one stone, we can connect to many places, to the memory of seeds, the memory of stones."

JS: Is this how you approach your sculpture-making? Do you come in with a set idea of the sculpture you want to make, or do you let the collected materials determine their final form through their interconnection? How much of it is driven by intention as opposed to openness?

JK: The methodologies for my sculpture and painting are different. I usually have an intention of what I want to say, of what I want to articulate in a clear sense. Sometimes my sculpture can be very holistic, as I try to integrate a nonlinear causality. How techno-futurism and techno-media influence and shape human cognition, our consciousness, and unconsciousness. How they force us to forget and block our curiosities, and the possibility of finding a better relationship with nature.

Yes, my sculptures are trying to criticize, but more importantly to rebuild the invisible senses made hidden by anthropocentric visions. I try to rebel, to reimagine and reclaim the forgotten senses, the buried histories and emotions.

JS: How much of your own personal stories show up in these narratives?

JK: Personal stories? I think I reflect my experience in everything I do. I’ve lived in New York, Scotland, London, Spain, and India. I always love to experience different systems and educations, which is a way to understand the diverse conditions of humanity.

I grew up in Korea, which is a very dynamic culture and also hierarchical. We are often neglected by capitalist strategies. As I grew up on the mountain, thinking about non-humans, I was always focused on human and non-human emotions. Meanwhile, capitalism dominates human consciousness and locks away our emotions. In the paintings and sculptures, I project and unfold my personal experience of systems, and different systems of living around the world.

JS: Breath is something that often comes up in your work: meditation and breath, specifically. I have another provocation, and I want to hear your response to what I'm about to say: perhaps your work and focus on breath is a form of a countervailing resistance to the suffocative qualities of capitalist systems—an opportunity to breathe as a way to resist the suffocation that it produces.

JK: Yes, by consciously and holistically breathing, being aware that your breath is a part of the breathing history of the earth. Breathing creates actions, breathing creates the action of policymaking and art-making, breathing connects to everything.

We share a million breaths with humans and non-humans, and dead ancestors and dead animals, and plants and dead plants, and soil and nitrate. Yeah, it is very important to notice these emotions. Breathing can connect so many emotions and colors.

Becoming One and Many Through Your Soul (detail), 2021

Photo by Felix Wong

JS: You're doing something beautiful here right now, where you're articulating breath and breathing as a collective thing. All breath is collective, and it is shared through trees, decomposition, soil, water, rain; through these processes breath circulates. It is a circulatory system that we all participate in, something we’re usually not aware of. If we think of breath as a collective thing, something we evolved with and into, does that help you blur and make more porous the boundary between human and non-human?

JK: As I mentioned, breathing can be such a portal to an attunement with the world. Conscious breathing can be an alternative training to search for other strategies, but its answers are always very basic.

By breathing only alone, of course, we can be aware of breathing more creatively or meditatively or futuristically, but by collectively breathing we can arouse collective thinking together.

JS: Could you talk about the exhibition, “Mountain's Scars: Vanishing Point of Regeneration?” It’s very beautiful and there's something… I say the word grotesque, not to mean ugly, but to indicate something earthly about it, caricatured, that calls our attention to it, in the way that it mutates, evolves, coexists. Could you walk us through that exhibition and the thinking behind it, and the final state that it emerged into?

JK: I presented the project at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea. In that exhibition, I focused on human perception in the exhibition space, and with art, and how to challenge anthropocentric visions. I altered and transformed the space and the entrance so that people would have to put their heads down when they went through. Entering the space is already the starting point, a causality zone. You enter into a different mindset when you walk into a dark room.

I thought it would help the audience’s concentration to open up many different narratives. In that exhibition, I arranged several different sculptures, each with its own narrative. They were all connected to the theme of ruthless mutations, showing the struggle of plant life and trees amidst extractivism. But also their resilience, and their desire to grow, as every breathing species has.

Another work, On the Horns of a Dilemma, is also about extractivism: how extractive movements are constantly destroying life. In that work, I made sculptures, sermons, and a water forest. Mountains have become extractive zones, whether for mining or for tourism. People can see different kinds of causalities created by humans and technologies.

A sense of parallel species (detail), 2021

Porcelain, paper mache, iron pipe

Photo by Junghun Kim.

JK: A work of mine I like is A Sense of Parallel Species, a collection of ceramic renditions of human scars, cows, birds, frogs, and snails that are all connected. It was early in the Coronavirus time, and I was thinking about how many kinds of viruses stem from humans' approaches to farming and livestock production. That work directly shows that having a parallel imagination, and parallel emotions, to connect with other species is an important practice.

At the end of the exhibition, when the audience exits through a 4-meter-high circular exit, you see the work of the “Mountain's Scar: Vanishing Point of Regeneration.” It's reflective, like a mirror, and people can see their own bodies and can also see the very, you say, grotesque, way that human technology extracts from, shapes, cuts, and designs the mountain.

JS: So much of what we are learning from science challenges the notion of the human and the non-human as two separate categories, but rather an endlessly complex web of life. This will be a bit of a risky leap on my part, but what I want to ask you is, what is the mountain’s imagination? What is the imagination of the non-human?

Do you think there’s a way to access this parallel?

JK: That's an interesting question. Capitalist desire connects to the top of the mountain a system that keeps manipulating and penetrating people's desire to forget about human ontology, and also about the existence of nature and human coexistence with it. This manipulation blocks and blurs humans' consciousness, like a constant coma of capitalism.

I think we need different training to embody the condition of others, first getting closer to the natural world and witnessing regenerative vibrancies, which would be an essential step to consciously acknowledge that we are animals that need to make different relationships with non-human life. By broadening spiritual diversities through reducing the mental and physical gap between artificial and natural systems, we learn from other species to revitalize our sense of animal, with our five senses, to extend our capacity to love and embody real physical and emotional connection to other species. We must discover diverse emotional equality in all breathing creatures.

It might give insights into resisting methodologies against extractive neoliberalism, emotionless techno-futurism, and the addictive consumption of penetration: to possibly create more ideas for renavigating a violent system. Rather than prioritizing economic benefit, collectively considering equality as a top priority to learn sympathy towards other humans, and non-human species, is the only way to argue for a sustainable system authentically.

I believe that people in positions of policymaking, government, investment, law, etc., that are related to the change of the natural environment, both in restorative and extractive directions, need to have various emotional trainings in order to imagine and embody the impact of their decisions. Before “practical” thinking, it should be mandatory to feel allied with non-humans and preciously responsible for their emotions when something has changed for them in the mountains, forests, water, or air.

In order to regenerate and restore the broken ecosystem, we need far more imagination to learn non-humans’ perspectives and trace their struggles in the actual sites. Human movements have constantly been disappointing flora and fauna’s expectations of their futures. If we are looking for a sustainable ecosystem, we will need to practice how to provide hope in multi-species life.

Exhibition view at MMCA Korea of “Mountain’s Scars: Vanishing Point of Regeneration,” 2021

Porcelain, ceramic pigment, iron plate, mirror, stones, and roots.

Photo by Junghun Kim

JS: Tying this into your sculptures—well, I don’t want to call it a staged interaction, but there's a narrative interaction that you produce through your sculpture, to call forth the materiality, the movement, the systems of the world at work.

It makes me think of Anna Tsing, and something she puts forth: “the liveliness of things.” There’s this idea in Western culture that we must make a distinction between beings and things. What if we were to question this distinction of a being versus a thing? Does it hold upon scrutiny?

JK: Again, referencing Tsing, I want to read you a quote I just pulled up: "Objects we recognize emerge through our apparatuses, thus we recognize the liveliness of the material through the liveliness of our knowledge apparatuses for engaging with it."

JS: Does that arouse any thoughts or emotions in you?

JK: There was a question you asked before about science, which is why I always think like an evolutionary biologist. Typical approaches to biology accelerate the manipulation of nature and produce divisions and taxonomies, rather than creating different ways of living with one another. How do we learn to self-exist in a balanced way while co-existing with other species?

I'm a little bit critical, and also skeptical, about certain scientific approaches which need to be rethought at the moment. There are so many forms of knowledge that artists or scientists or biologists or psychologists can engage with. Not just practically, but politically and artistically, to articulate different philosophies and thoughts. Like arising sympathetic imaginations and collective thinking. I'm not just seeing. Vision isn’t necessarily my primary mode of working.

"There are so many forms of knowledge that artists or scientists or biologists or psychologists can engage with. Not just practically, but politically and artistically, to articulate different philosophies and thoughts. Like arising sympathetic imaginations and collective thinking. I'm not just seeing. Vision isn’t necessarily my primary mode of working."

JS: The forms that your work takes resists any recognizable final form. I have to sit with it and think, "Well, what is this?"

Perhaps this is not necessarily the final fixed form, but rather one physical moment of a fluid system. It exceeds what we think a final form should look like. It evolves past that. Honestly, I’m not sure what my question here is, but I’m reaching for this idea that your work is itself part of an evolutionary process. Do you see it in that way at all?

JK: In my sculptures, there are so many details that you can't see from pictures alone, that require close observation and spending time with it. I engrave many dynamic meanings and narratives about how human desire is transforming and changing the balance of the natural world, the balance of water, air, etc.

I'm trying to show the scene, the landscape. This is the reason why I'm not really interested in showing recognizable figures, like a face or a machine. There are non-human ways of knowing the world.

Eco dynamics (Installation view), 2019

Ceramic, glass, clay, iron pipe, mixed media

Photo by Jang Hwal Lim

"There are non-human ways of knowing the world."

JS: I'm going to let the poet inside of me emerge here for a second. I want to ask you a series of very quick questions that I’ve been jotting down as we’ve been talking. What is your favorite sense right now?

JK: Smelling.

JS: At what pace does your work move?

JK: My speed is to keep various tentacles and rootings. Think about snails' antennae and tentacles. I don't want to erase some tentacles, which are all possibilities of different communications within my work. So the speed of my work would be the speed of maintaining diversities.

JS: If your work exists outside of linear time, at what time does it exist in? Is it mountain time, breath time, or snail time?

JK: Let me think. It doesn't. I don't want to say time. I want to be the edge that goes to many places. I want to throw past the many different nows and find a longer time, to have the time to…

JS: A non-time, almost. You want to exist in a non-time?

JK: It's difficult to say, but the time that can sense various emotional trajectories.

"I want to be the edge that goes to many places. I want to throw past the many different nows and find a longer time."

JS: What gives you courage?

JK: Spiritual imagination. Spiritual connections that I use. The time of spiritual connections. Spiritual fertilizers. Engaging and interacting with others. And learning and training, how to take care of and look after one’s emotions, to be aware of so many different emotions that all exist at once, inside and outside of the body. This sustains my workflow.

JS: Who or what do you consider your greatest teacher?

JK: The Five Elements.

JS: What defines the boundaries of your art?

JK: Diverse. I don't want to define which kind of artist I am, but as I mentioned, keep many tentacles.

Rootless mutation, 2021

Porcelain, iron pipe, paper mache

Photo by Cho JunYong

The speed of desire, 2020

Integrated erosion/black porcelain, paper mache, natural pigments, iron pipe, wire, mixed media

Photo by Cho JunYong

JS: Who does the earth remember about you, or, what do the stones remember about you?

JK: Promise.

JS: Tell me about the last storm you remember being in.

JK: The last storm wasn’t so stormy, but it was very windy. The last night that I was on the mountain, it was snowing as I was coming down, and I didn’t have any sight. Just going down from the top of the mountain without visible light and with a blanket of snow.

JS: Did you have a different relationship with your senses when your vision was obscured?

JK: Yes, with obscured vision I was hearing the sounds of snowy wind, animals howling and stepping roughly and softly on the snow with concentrated breathing, which naturally opened my hyper-sensory system mainly not to get hurt or fall down but also to enjoy those processes, such as making the right and wrong decision of which direction I took and also re-navigating through encouraging myself continuously.

It is a complicated feeling, many emotions circulate very quickly in my mind: fear, poetic, lonely, strong, confusion, memories, illusions, hope, and also imagination. Often, I stopped and concentrated on my five senses, to be connected with the energy of the mountain, to become one with them and express my honesty and curiosity about the principle of multiple systems and mystery, like having a dialogue. To make a promise to keep the root of my spirit healthy, to work for nature.

Joal Stein: Which direction of the earth does your work point towards? Does it go north, south, east, west, or none of the above?

JK: It goes in the direction of seeds. I will circulate.

Joal Stein

Joal Stein is a poet + strategist working across art, philosophy, and technology. He has received fellowships at Banff Centre, RACC, Autodesk Foundation, Rauschenberg Foundation, and ToftH. His writing has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, LA Times Magazine, Atmos, Deem Journal, Public Books, and Adroit Journal. He is currently working on topics of silence, language, creativity, and artificial intelligence.