Friendship and Truth: Creating a Community of Care through Performative Practice
Kim Junghyun, Art Critic
In meeting and conversing with Kim Insook to write this text, what I unexpectedly spent the longest time listening to her about—in great detail—was the installation of the work. Kim’s recent series Eye to Eye (2022–) documents years of exchange and communion with children at Sant’Ana School (Colégio Sant’Ana), established for the Brazilian immigrant community in Shiga Prefecture, Japan. Exhibitions related to this project have been held on several occasions, from the commissioned exhibition at Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2023 to the 2024 group exhibition Where My Words Belong (翻訳できないわたしの言葉 ) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Although it first debuted through a commission, Kim’s project began before plans were set to present it in exhibition format. This point requires careful attention. In the work of artists who have learned and employ photography as their primary medium, their creative work is perceived as relatively free from the complex conventions of exhibition production. Of course, regardless of the medium, one carefully considers the interrelationship between the architectural structure of the space and the images for an exhibition, but compared to works that take the space itself as their medium, pre-production before exhibition planning is not so unusual for painting or photography.
Things like the width and height of screens, the arrangement of multi-screens, the sequence of pieces being displayed with consideration for viewing circulation, the decision to exclude textual information from the first impression of images, and the decision to erase sound from videos or have multi-channel videos intermingle to create murmuring. And how much all of this changes according to different exhibition venues, spatial structures, and curatorial contexts, even to the point of re-examining source videos and photographs almost from the beginning. As Kim’s exhibitions were all held in Japan and I couldn’t view them in person, while listening to these detailed explanations of how the installation was done in each exhibition, I discovered Kim’s strangely particular way of thinking about installation. When I pointed this out, Kim exclaimed with delight and enthusiasm, “Yes, I’m practically an installation artist!” When it comes to Kim, it seems many have viewed her as a photographer based on her primary medium, or as a community artist focusing on themes she has continuously explored. Though somewhat unsatisfactory, these descriptions aren’t wrong—yet something seems insufficient. Then, having broadly classified her medium as photo-installation, should we now, having secured her own testimony, correct her designation to (almost) installation artist? Whichever we go with, it seems just as narrow and unrepresentative as the Zainichi artist label she was so quickly branded with in Korea and Japan.
No expression accurate and efficient enough to replace this unsatisfactory designation comes to mind. This may perhaps be due to the exclusivity that inevitably accompanies naming. Such is the level of complexity and stratification in Kim’s work, with its multiple focal points. Kim, having formed a connection with Sant’Ana School through a proposal from a local art museum, develops relationships from the point of being a complete stranger, gradually becoming a familiar outsider through repeated encounters, and then a dependable acquaintance who joins in various games and activities. In the process of skillfully exercising sociability to mingle with members of an unfamiliar community and build rapport, what she does is not limited to merely securing video or photographic source material needed for her work. If we must distinguish, it is closer to the tradition of cinéma-vérité, where one participates in events with camera in hand as a member of the scene, rather than direct cinema, which records the scene as an observer maintaining distance from the subject. Moreover, Kim’s work evokes home movies in its emphasis on extremely personal and intimate relationships.
Ten years ago, Kim carried out a project called House to Home (2015) in Seongbuk-dong. While staying at the Old House operated by CAN Foundation, she explored the concept of family expansion—becoming family with strangers—reflecting her own experience of living away from home.[1] Here, residents of the Seongbuk-dong neighborhood around the house became involved in the project in various ways and were documented in several short videos. For the exhibition, Kim borrowed furniture from neighbors, loaded it on a cart, and traversed the winding alleyways, revealing the neighborhood’s landscape in the context of daily life and care. If in medieval times community meant “the range within which church bells could be heard”[2], here it becomes the range within which one can roll a cart to directly borrow and return objects. The exploration of the concept of family took the form of a kind of anthropological research, inviting nearby family units and people in family-like relationships to conduct group interviews.
The fact that Kim’s performative practice of creating a community of care is not predetermined to forms of relationship (blood relations, acquaintances, or neighbors) or places (home or neighborhood) became clear through Eye to Eye. Traveling the long distance from her residence in Tokyo to Shiga Prefecture near Kyoto, the secret to Kim becoming close with new people was—while her remarkable affability certainly played a part—above all, sharing time. Therefore, can viewers also empathize with the relationships and emotions between Kim and the people appearing in her work? Can we avoid objectifying the faces we encounter through photographs and videos in the exhibition space? This must be why Kim willingly seeks to become an installation artist. Because she hopes that viewers, who are effectively unrelated and indifferent strangers to these communities, will nevertheless not reduce the faces in the images to abstractions, or judge them arbitrarily. For instance, short portrait videos of the children, edited in vertical format, occupy the screen with a monumental presence in larger-than-life proportions. Viewers entering the exhibition space are gripped by the gazes of the images before having the chance to properly take them in or do any gazing themselves. Approaching the work closely, the viewer vividly encounters figures at actual (or enlarged) size, and because screens often face each other front and back, is subjected to the gaze of the image from behind their head.
Kim’s warmth and fellowship belie a subversive attitude. She appropriates the exclusivity of friendship. Distancing herself from the history of media and theory-centered art discourse that experts have constructed in closed circles within museums, she returns the sovereignty of the museum’s time and space to the neighbors she has befriended. She is also reserved about conventional perceptions of the relationship between human faces and the impressions they evoke, and about the fuss over artistic genius and the truth of artworks implicit in rhetoric such as portrait photography that captures the essence of human interiority. Truth is generated within the moments when humans meet gazes and share affection. If Kim can capture any truth, it would be truth stemming from the time, experience, and care she has invested in her own field.
Kim Junghyun
Kim Junghyun is an art critic. She is the author of Torrents of the Exterior—Performance of Art in Exhaustion (Seoul: Mediabus, 2024). Kim received the 1st SeMA-Hana Art Criticism Award in 2015. She also curated exhibitions including Last Dinosaur/This Event (Seoul Museum of Art, 2020), Change Nothing (Insa Art Space and others, 2016-2020), and Performance History (Platform L, 2017). Kim has also been a resident researcher at Tokyo Arts and Space (2023), Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (2018), and SeMA Nanji Residency (2017).
[1] Kim Insook, Translatability in Artwork Production and Appreciation: Record of Kim Insook’s Workshop, (2022).
[2] Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, trans. Dongkun Yim (Paju: Munhakdongne, 2021), 183– 192.
＊This text was written as part of the 19th Critical Writing Workshop at Nanji Residency, Seoul Museum of Art, in 2025.
