Artists
South Korea
Hee Ju Im
Outputs
22.11.22 16.12.22
As part of the agreement that Fundación´ace has with ARKO — Art Council Korea, artist Hee Ju Im came to our studio in November-December to do a Production Residency. She is a musician and sound artist in a loop of disassembling and making up again.
ARTIST STATEMENT
The things I’ve been interested in in in recent years are sound, abject, and self-sufficient technology. I have been finding the stories that can be tied up through the relationship of these three from various angles.
The concept of abject from Julia Kristeva anchors my thoughts and ways of expressing. According to Kristeva, abject threatens the boundaries of the subject. Also abject is the otherness that is rejected as an excessive existence in the body of the subject, and it is a being that resists and rebels to the subject while forming it at the same time.
Through music education and the work experience of sound and noise brought myself to realise that the nature of sound has do to with the abject that transverses the boundaries. I am working on the belief that the nature of sound that expands and penetrates can become a link with abjective beings.
In recent years, the theoretical study of feminism and media and the practice of ‘making’ things have been conducted concurrently with the question of ‘What would be if abjective beings were sound?’, ‘What would that be sounds like?’. With these questions, I am keep repeating the process of constructing and deconstructing the sound and thoughts.
BIO
Hee Ju Im
1993 | Seoul, South Korea
EDUCATION
2018 | BA, Goldsmiths (UoL) – UK
EXHIBITIONS
2022 | Ssang-Cha-Ssang-Jo 双遮双照 : The Dream of Rainbow – Boan Artspace 3 (Boan 1942) – Seoul; ATM X WORM: Borderless Point—Oil Tank Culture Park – Seoul, South Korea
2021 | Sound Abject, Factory2 – Seoul, South Korea
2020 | The First Wave – Sum-Do, Geoje, South Korea; Baeyangjang Project : Baeyang – Bae-yang-jang – Tong-Young, South Korea
RESIDENCIES
2020 | The First Wave – Geoje, South Korea; Baeyangjang Project : Baeyang – Bae-yang-jang – Tong-Young, South Korea
2018 | The Mall—London/CAS—UK
AWARDS
2022 | Interdisciplinary Art Project Support Funding, Arts Council Korea; Solo Exhibition Support, DoLuck 08 X Verses, Boan194
2021 Art and Tech / Creative Artist Support, Art Center Nabi – South Korea; Artist Support Funding, Seoul Foundation for the Arts and Culture – South Korea
2020 | Project Funding, Anyang Foundation for the Culture and Arts – South Korea
Related Activities
Exhibitions
Outputs
Hee Ju Im
06.12.22 23.12.22
As a finishing instance to her residency at ´ace, Hee Ju Im opened to the public her sound installation Outputs. The sound installations are a combination of found-objects that can be easily found inside and outside the ´ace workshop and its studio, motors and modules that enable movements. Cupboard cases that would have been used to store papers, leftover tapes, press tables for printing, racks for storing prints, toys for children, and machines collide to create an environment in which two ears are “blocked.”
Musicologist Kim Kyung-hwa wrote about the artist’s attitude and method of approaching noise and sound in an article for the exhibition Ssang Cha Ssang Jo: “She adheres to the sound of noise, which is the sound of unpleasant, loud, nerve-racking, confusion-causing, and therefore excluded and alienated. Noise, which everyone is uncomfortable with, is the driving force of creation for the artist and the power to shine on the one’s inside. At the boundary of sound, the alienating aspect of noise becomes a powerful tool for her to say something. Noise, which the artist has observed, is an abjective existence.”
This sound installation was created by modifying and reconstructing Outputs (2022) of the Ssang Cha Ssang Jo (Block to Reveal): The Dream of Rainbow, a project that considers listening to loud and intrusive sounds as auditory masochism. It means that a being that is constantly heard but overlooked, a being that is everywhere but not revealed, a being that everyone is uncomfortable, a being that cannot define boundaries, or a being that blurs boundaries, and thus a being of “otherisation” thrown out of boundaries. Rather, noise rejects identification and subverts order and system, or the power to operate it.
Together with Hee Ju Im, her Korean colleague Heesoo Agnes Kim opened her exhibition, and we also hosted the work of our residents Michael Sell (USA), Alex Karolyi (Canada) and Marcela Caballero (Argentina).
´aceNITE, Exhibitions
Revelations
Artists in Dialogue
06.12.22
What is the nature of reality? Do we all experience the same reality? How is it revealed?
Catching sleep every night, when insomnia appears, thinking does not stop and our eyes remain open even though we close them, when anguish or perhaps fear of increasingly threatening shadows occurs… it is at that moment that we are in a bit out of reality? On the contrary, when we fall asleep and dream, within the dream, no matter how absurd what we dream is, we feel that it is real. How do you experience the supernatural, that which cannot be explained by the laws of nature or that exceeds its limits, that set off realities, known by revelation or admitted by faith? Do these facts, which are not entitatively natural, exist as well as the facts of the natural world?
What are the limits? Do these limits exist? Or do you flow between wakefulness, sleep and the state in between?
In Insomnis, Heesoo Agnes Kim plays with the notion of dreams, deals with issues of self-identification, explores the limits between time, light and life. With his camera, Mitchell Sell discovers the phenomenon of blurring of social and political boundaries that occurred in Buenos Aires when Argentina won its third World Cup. Alex Karolyi in The Unknown, works with true supernatural and paranormal stories (in this case related to the house of ´ace itself) in a performative way, considering that everyone has a story to share, whether visible or invisible. Finally, Hee Ju Im in Outputs investigates those sounds that are constantly heard but overlooked, a being that is everywhere but does not reveal itself, a being that cannot define limits or a being that erases limits, and therefore both a being of “otherness” thrown out of bounds. All of them, from different perspectives, reveal to us fluctuating aspects of our “realities”.
ALICIA CANDIANI
