Gimhongsok (b. 1964) has been rearranging various social, political, and cultural phenomena through translation and appropriation in his works, starting from text-based works that rely on ambiguity to address the boundary between reality and fiction, for the past 20 years.

Through various media such as sculpture, installation, video, painting, drawing, and performance, Gim’s work questions the viewer by overturning existing notions and preconceived notions by revealing the social consensus that makes contemporary art recognized as art and the intertwined systems centered on the art world.

From 1998 to 2011, Gimhongsok produced the ‘Assimilated Differences’ series in writing, performance, painting, and video that address translation, appropriation, reinterpretation, and difference through various mediums. While the Western context of contemporary art and its visualization is defined by difference, ‘Assimilated Differences’ appropriates both the originality implicit in difference and the boundaries between difference and difference.

For example, the text work Thump! is translated from Korean, English, Japanese, French, and back to Korean in a series of translations. With each translation, the work becomes increasingly distant from the original, with titles changing, narratives distorted, and authorship obscured.

The differences created by these repeated serial translation act as a way of ‘creating’ for the artist. The birth of an ambiguous identity that results is one of the important points in Gim’s work, the ‘assimilated difference’. His work allows us to perceive difference in a richer way than simply recording it.

And through his ‘Subsidiary Construction’ project, which he has been working on since 2008, Gim has been talking about the political attitudes and ethical politics of art through materials and forms. Both the politics of materials implied by stone, metal, wood, and canvas as traditional art materials and the politics of attitude in the everyday objects chosen by contemporary artists all point to a subjective object with clear boundaries.

However, to reverse this binary opposition of subject and periphery, Gimhongsok subjectivizes peripheral materials. Packing materials, Styrofoam, cardboard boxes, plastic bags, and other auxiliary materials used to protect artworks are extended to Gim’s three-dimensional works.

For example, his Canine Construction resembles the form of Jeff Koons’s Dog, but instead of the stainless steel, it is made of black plastic bags filled with trash. These works, which transform commodities into artworks, subvert the hierarchy of periphery and center while appropriating the works of leading Western contemporary artists.

This is Rabbit is a work in which a laborer from North Korea, living illegally in South Korea, is hired for $5 an hour to stay in an exhibition hall for eight hours a day in a rabbit suit. However, there is no one inside the rabbit suit, it is actually a puppet. The realism of the “escaped illegal immigrant” setting prevents the audience from suspecting that there is no one inside.

In this way, the artist’s deception is in line with social reality. Talk (2004), an interview with an East Timorese migrant worker, is also nothing more than an actor’s performance. The artist deceives the audience with plausible fiction about minorities in our society and leads the audience to recognize the fake. Through this process, Gim asks what is real and what is false.

Gimhongsok’s ‘People Objective’ project, which began in 2011, begins with Gim inviting “people” to participate in his work who are physically and conceptually close to him as an artist and as individuals in his society. In this project, the people he invites (or hires) are actors, docents, critics, and day laborers.

The performance work People Objective-Good Critique, Bad Critique, Strange Critique takes the form of a lecture and discussion in which three critics are hired to review the work. The three critiques, along with the artwork presented by the artist, are completed as a collaborative work by the four people and four independent works.

The audience is exposed to the intellectual labor of others involved in the artwork, as well as the process of social agreement on economic compensation, and is exposed to the capitalism and cold reality that exists behind the art.

Gimhongsok is interested in the numerous drawings and diagrams that are required to create a three-dimensional work or installation, which end up playing a secondary role after the work is created. The artist is working on a ‘Completed Imperfectness’ project in which the drawings, which are used as tools for the finished object, are brought to the center of the work to complete the work. For example, he crumples a piece of paper irregularly and then draws a diagram to reproduce it in another material, assuming that the crumpled state is the finished state.

The artist suggests that our desire for perfection is a human tendency and a result of social learning. Incomplete Order Development (Will) is a sculptural work that uses Styrofoam as the main material, a material that is usually used for temporary purposes. The Styrofoam panels are cut during the construction process according to the dimensions of the drawings, and the shapes of the sheets are inconsistent once they are no longer needed.

This is also true when Gim uses Styrofoam as a material for his works. By proposing irregular, incomplete, and voluntary pieces of Styrofoam as artworks, the artist defies ‘artistic form’ or ‘completeness’ as defined by collective consensus, and instead values incompleteness.

“It is the artist’s responsibility to change our perceptions by expressing the definitions we have come to believe in and take for granted, by any means necessary. In the end, what matters most to an artist is the answer to the question: What does art do?”

Born in Seoul, Korea, Gimhongsok graduated from the Department of Sculpture, Seoul National University, and studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany, in the 1990s. Currently a professor of Stage Art at Sangmyung University, Gim has held solo and group exhibitions at major institutions across the globe including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Art Sonje Center, Seoul.

He has also participated in a wide range of major international exhibitions, including the Oku-Noto Triennale (2017), Nanjing International Art Festival (2016), Yokohama Triennale (2014), Gwangju Biennale (2012), Biennale de Lyon (2009), and La Biennale di Venezia (2005, 2003).

Gim’s works are housed in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; The Queensland Art Gallery (QAGOMA), Brisbane, Australia; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Japan; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea; Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, Korea; Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, Busan, Korea; and Posco Museum, Pohang, Korea.

References

• 김홍석, Gimhongsok (Artist Website)
• 아트선재센터, 김홍석: 평범한 이방인 (Art Sonje Center, Gimhongsok: Ordinary Strangers)
• 세마코랄, 인간질서-질문들 (SeMA Coral, Human Order-Questions)
• 김성원, THE FAKE AS MORE
• 국제갤러리, 실패를 목적으로 한 정상적 질서 (Kukje Gallery, Normal order aimed at failure)