Installation view of 《Have Many Dumb Fights Against Rock》 ⓒ MMCA
The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA),
in partnership with LG Electronics, presents the MMCA×LG OLED Series 2026:
Christine Sun Kim 《Have Many Dumb Fights
Against Rock》 through November 29, at MMCA Seoul.
Each year, a single artist is selected via recommendations and
review by experts in Korea and abroad to produce a site-specific commission for
the Seoul Box—MMCA Seoul’s central exhibition space—proposing an exhibition
environment in which art, technology, space, and audience come together
organically.
The inaugural edition in 2025 featured artist Tzusoo, whose
large-scale installation transformed the Seoul Box into a space of sensation
reflecting the sensibilities of the digital generation and contemporary
discourse on gender.
The second edition centers on Christine Sun Kim, a Korean-American
artist based in Berlin. Working across drawing, performance, video, and sound
installation, Kim has explored language, sound, accessibility, translation, and
social interaction. For this exhibition, she unveils a new work created for the
Seoul Box, Have Many Dumb Fights Against Rock.
Installation view of 《Have Many Dumb Fights Against Rock》 ⓒ MMCA
The piece unfolds as a large-scale animated video installation:
across one wall, animation is screened on a massive curved OLED display
measuring 8.1 by 5.4 meters, while graphics derived from the artist’s drawings
stretch organically across the surrounding walls and floor.
The new work reflects a facet of contemporary society in which
conflict and relentless confrontation persist, amplified by online media. The
work’s title—also used as the exhibition title—metaphorically captures the ways
increasingly polarized political discourse and argument circulate and recur
without ever reaching mutual understanding, while simultaneously retaining the
artist’s characteristic wit.
By visually translating and reconstructing the systems of language
and structures of communication at work, Kim invites renewed reflection on the
very way we relate to the world. Rooted in deaf experience, her work expands
into the universal terrain of accessibility and communication.
Installation view of 《Have Many Dumb Fights Against Rock》 ⓒ MMCA
For
this new commission, Kim draws her primary visual vocabulary from graphic
imagery inspired by the motion lines of classic comics. Conveying speed,
direction, and impact, these motion lines serve as more than mere indicators of
movement; instead, they function as a visual device revealing how language and
social relationships form, collide, and undergo translation.
The
lines and symbols that stretch across the walls and floor of the Seoul Box
visualize the communicative structure of a contemporary society that moves
between online and offline, its recurring conflicts, and the encounters between
differing senses and languages.
Within
a space where drawing, video, and sound shift in response to one another,
viewers come to experience language as movement, rhythm, and relation. Kim
converts questions of social norms, power, accessibility, and translation into
visual experience, proposing a new way of thinking about how we relate to the
world.
