Sejin Kim (b. 1971) explores the lives of individuals within the complex, multifaceted structures of contemporary society through film techniques that blend cinema and documentary, as well as through sound and video installations, creating a multisensory experience.
 
The artist focuses on the alienation, isolation, anxiety, and loneliness that inevitably arise as “anonymous individuals” within systems resist or adapt to societal regulations. Recently, Kim has delved into the diverse networks emerging within digital environments, continuing to reveal the uncertain and fluid structures of today’s world.

In Take a Picture (2002), exhibited in Project 3 of the Gwangju Biennale, Sejin Kim focuses on the historical specificity of Gwangju, using the medium of video to reflect on the history of individuals and collectives. Through the question, “Is history truly absolute?” Kim captures students posing for a commemorative photo in a three-minute video.
 The students, initially appearing frozen in place for a photograph, suddenly start moving, revealing the piece as a video rather than a static image. Through this, Kim suggests that history, unlike a photograph confined within a single frame, is a mutable concept that can be reinterpreted and rewritten over time, using the inherent properties of video to convey this idea.

In Night Watch (2006), a three-channel video work created during the artist’s stay in Taipei, Sejin Kim captures the lives of individuals in Asian countries. Within a city where the lights stay on even through the night, the artist observes the shared lifestyle patterns of modern people living in Taiwan, Korea, and other Asian countries, along with the various symptoms that emerge from this way of life.
 
Unlike Western cities, Asian cities operate around the clock under the glow of neon signs, presenting a vibrant but complex landscape where loneliness and alienation coexist beneath the surface. Kim portrays these subtle yet pervasive feelings of isolation and solitude experienced by city dwellers.
 
The three channels of Night Watch depict people eating alone, a blind person playing the harmonica on the street, and the city’s dazzling yet melancholic neon-lit nightscape. Through these scenes, the artist reveals the invisible gap between the constantly transforming urban spaces and the identity of modern life within them.

Since the 2010s, Sejin Kim’s work has focused on themes of life and labor as an outsider, influenced by her experiences in international residencies and studying in the UK. Sleeping Sun (2012), based on her time in England, revisits memories of unjust experiences as a foreigner through a fictionalized and imagined space-time.
 
Unlike previous works, Sleeping Sun directly incorporates a narrative style. Here, the real setting of England in 2012 transforms into an unnamed planet, and the artist portrays herself as an alien with half-blonde, half-black hair—an Asian woman.

In Sleeping Sun, the alien who has arrived on an unnamed planet in search of a better future looks around her surroundings before meeting the viewer’s gaze, her eyes reflecting a cityscape. She then appears standing like a giant among small houses, while a control tower in the city emits continuous sounds, seemingly giving her instructions.
 
Although the city of England is depicted in a distorted form, Kim’s experience of being othered is transformed into a sense of agency through the protagonist, the alien. This character reclaims her narrative, turning the experience of alienation into an empowered, self-possessed image.

This narrative intervention evolves in Proximity of Longing (2016), a video work presented at the SONGEUN Art Award exhibition, where it takes the form of a “visual narrative.” According to the artist, visual narrative does not build structure through traditional storytelling elements, as in literature or film. Instead, it constructs a multisensory narrative structure through components like visuals, sound, and framing.
 
Proximity of Longing employs various methods of moving images, such as found footage, live-action filming, and animation, along with the addition of voice-over and subtitles, attempting documentary grammar and techniques as a new form.

Proximity of Longing is based on this new multisensory visual narrative structure and consists of three episodes: Twelve Chairs, Angel Island, and Tortilla Chinantla. The work addresses global migration and immigration phenomena, as well as the personal histories, historical foundations, and collective utopias underlying these movements.
 
The first episode, Twelve Chairs, focuses on abandoned chairs found on Ellis Island in the eastern United States, where European immigrants once awaited entry screenings. It examines the lasting influence of the power wielded by dominant nations throughout history.
 
Angel Island, the second episode, juxtaposes poems left by Asian immigrants in the U.S. with the history of discrimination they faced as minorities. The final episode, Tortilla Chinantla, explores the history of Mexican immigration in the U.S. through one of America’s most popular foods, the tortilla, highlighting the desire for a collective utopia and the gap between this aspiration and reality.

In 2019, after winning the Grand Prize at the 16th SONGEUN Art Award, the artist held a solo exhibition titled “Walk in the Sun” at SONGEUN. The exhibition featured new works based on the artist’s journey from Antarctica to the Arctic region of Lapland. These new pieces highlight the gap between reality and illusion by either depicting real stories through fictional images or fitting real stories and images into fictional narrative structures.

One of these works, Messenger(s) (2019), is a hyper-realistic video piece featuring ‘Laika,’ the "space dog" who became the first living creature to orbit Earth aboard the Soviet satellite Sputnik 2. Through 3D motion graphics, the artist recreates Laika, symbolizing a messenger, to reflect humanity's desire for exploration and expansion into the unknown, while also commemorating the countless beings sacrificed in the name of progress.

2048 (2019) is a fake documentary work that establishes a fictional continent named "G," based on footage the artist shot during a two-week residency in Antarctica. The title 2048 refers to the year when the Antarctic Treaty, which was signed to ensure the peaceful use of Antarctica's land and sea for scientific research, will expire.
 
Through this work, Kim blends actual footage with landscapes created using graphic programs, creating a narrative structure that blurs the lines between documentary and fiction. It envisions the state of Antarctica in 2048, following the expiration of the Antarctic Treaty.

Alongside this, Kim presented Mosaic Transition (2019), a work that explores how digital images and data created by advancements in technology operate within our society. Mosaic Transition is a video sound piece that features two split screens, where images repeatedly fragment and merge, discussing the malfunctions occurring in the digital realm filled with countless floating pieces of information.
 
To achieve this, the artist utilizes digital images that visualize data related to meteorological information, such as climate data, derived from big data. Through these digital moving images and sounds, Mosaic Transition depicts the process by which virtual information, like digital images or data in the internet environment, becomes formalized in the realm of reality. At the same time, it evokes a landscape of unconditional faith in these malfunctions, despite their ambiguous accuracy.

In this way, Kim has been working to reveal the structures of the world that define anonymous individuals such as migrants, refugees, and night workers and affect their living conditions. At the same time, she has conducted various experiments that explore the gap between fictional and actual images through diverse audiovisual structures, conveying the underlying aspects of the world she observes and seeks to discuss in a synesthetic manner.

“I focus on the chemical reactions and moments like alienation, isolation, anxiety, and loneliness that are inevitably produced from the process of revolt or acclimation by anonymous individuals who exist under control for the purpose of maintaining diverse and complicated systems of a contemporary society that are simultaneously at play.

So in expressing the contemporary possibilities regarding methods of existence that side more with individuality than conventionality, inherent values rather than those transcendental, I have been using various mediums and methods such as digital moving images, sound, kinetic pieces the use the basic principles of moving images, narrative structures of film, and documentary-like narratives that adopt realistic recording methods.”
(Sejin Kim, Artist Statement)

Sejin Kim graduated from the Department of Oriental Painting at Hongik University and then majored in film at the Graduate School of Media Arts at Sogang University. She further studied media art at Slade School of Fine Art (UCL) in the UK. She began her solo exhibitions in 2005 at Insa Art Space and has since held numerous solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions both domestically and internationally.
 
In 2017, she was selected as the winner of the Grand Prize at the 16th SONGEUN Art Award. She has also received the ‘Henry Tonks Prize’ (2011), ‘Bloomberg New Contemporaries’ (2011), and in 2005, she was awarded the 4th Daum Prize by the Parkgeonhi Foundation. She has participated in residency programs at Taipei Artist Village in 2006, the MMCA Residency Goyang from 2007 to 2008, the Geumcheon Art Factory from 2014 to 2015, and ISCP in New York in 2015.

References

• 송은, Walk in the Sun (SONGEUN, Walk in the Sun)
• 송은, 김세진 작가노트 1 (SONGEUN, Sejin Kim Artist Statement 1)
• 서울시립미술관, [SeMA 소장품] 기념 사진, 2002, 김세진 (Seoul Museum of Art, [SeMA Collection] Take a Picutre, 2002, Sejin Kim)
• 한국문화예술위원회, 김세진 (Arts Council Korea, Sejin Kim)
• 서울시립미술관, [SeMA 소장품] 잠자는 태양, 2012, 김세진 (Seoul Museum of Art, [SeMA Collection] Sleeping Sun, 2012, Sejin Kim)
• 송은, 제16회 송은미술대상 (SONGEUN, 16th SONGEUN Art Award)
• 더 스트림, 시각적 서사의 질감: 김세진_INTERVIEW, 2016.12.23
• 앨리스온, 송은 아트스페이스 × 김세진 part II, Kim SeJin, 2020.02.29