This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Myeongsoo Kim: Mother-Land, curated by Michelle Yun, on view at CUE Art Foundation from October 7 – November 3, 2020. This text is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE.
Myeongsoo Kim, Extreme Competition-Poids, 2020. Clear varnished pigment print mounted on Dibond, poly-finished MDF, 40 x 35 x 5 inches.
Myeongsoo Kim’s collection of Olympic-themed stamps are equal parts works of art and utilitarian objects. There is a particular timelessness to the stamps that could be described as retro-futuristic. Such an aesthetic reminds the artist of the sports movies he grew up on as a child in Seoul. While he may have been too young to understand the symbolic implications of movies like Miracle on Ice (1981) and Rocky IV (1985) in the context of Cold War–era politics, he recalls how these films and others like them fetishized the West. Kim thinks of his collection of Olympic stamps and memorabilia as an extension of this fetishization. Keeping hundreds of them in a box—some laminated, some grouped together thematically—they have become uniquely personal fetish objects.
Each stamp is perfect and precise in its depiction of athletic bodies. One of Kim’s favorites features a male gymnast performing on the high bar. His circular motion around the bar is captured frame by frame, resembling Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth-century photographs of galloping horses. Others depict images of fencers, boxers, sharpshooters, and wrestlers. One portrays a javelin thrower mid-stride, while another captures a shot-putter taking the penultimate step before his throw, his cheeks puffed up with air. More often than not, the athletes appear to be white men. Their race and gender are presented as the normative ideal, a tell-tale sign of Western influence. Kim reproduces blown-up versions of his stamps, fragmenting the images into digital collages, a method that breaks down the legibility of the subject itself. In this process, the fragile power of the fetish object is ruptured. For his exhibition at CUE, Kim reconstructs sites, both physical and metaphorical, where the soft power of cultural exchange and the hard power of military dominance have become intertwined. In focusing on the propagandistic power of images, he considers the effect of visual culture on spaces that bear remnants of colonial influence.
Kim studied architecture in South Korea before moving to the U.S. in 2002. His architectural background readily translates into his visual art practice, which combines elements of photography, sculpture, and digital fabrication. Much of his inspiration and photographic work has been drawn from landscapes in the American Southwest. He often transforms photographs of land into sculptural reliefs by elevating segments of the images and building out detailed layers, a technique that transposes the textural makeup of landscape onto a flat photographic plane. Each sculptural layer (which he fabricates in his Brooklyn studio) recalls a topographic map and complicates the distinction between two- and three-dimensional space. Images of rock quarries, sand dunes, foothills, and lakes represent spaces nearly devoid of human life, spaces that are now virtually extinct in societies where the visual traces of colonization have remained intact. The political divisions and disorder produced by occupation have marked land and cityscapes, a disruption that we are now reckoning with on an unprecedented global scale as national monuments are being slated for removal. The intangible traces of colonial history are of particular interest to Kim—his work meditates on how these moments of unrest never truly disappear from cultural memory.
Throughout his work, Kim considers structures that collapse the boundary between natural and man-made environments. A vintage-style postcard from the Salton Sea used to hang on the wall in his studio, and is now part of one of his sculptures. It shows a family—a mother and her children—sitting on the beach with their backs turned. The Salton Sea is a now infamous saltwater lake located on the San Andreas Fault in California. The name of the site itself is misleading—the “sea” is a shallow, man-made, massive expanse of water constructed in 1905 as an irrigation canal for California’s Imperial Valley. The canal was eventually flooded, and the preexisting Salton Basin became the Salton Sea. Water cannot escape the sea; over many decades the lack of drainage has destabilized its salinity, making it a threat to its own ecosystem. Kim’s sculpture juxtaposes his postcard with a photograph he took of the sea at night; a full moon hovers against the pitch-black sky, and its glow reflects off the water. Small metal and wooden objects are placed on a ledge jutting out from the center of the sculpture, subtly echoing the position of the family on the postcard. His sculpture recreates the site, with a somewhat uncanny tone; the small objects act as totems in an isolated landscape. Kim is fascinated with the history of the Salton Sea as both a testament to human innovation and a symbol of failed modernity. There is a disconnect between the propagated image of the postcard and the reality of the environmental disaster the sea has become. This contrast between object and image is a primary concern for Kim, who reconsiders how images may be used to perpetuate idealized histories and cultural legacies.
Myeongsoo Kim, Untitled_Landscapes High and Dry, 2020. Clear varnished pigment print mounted on Dibond, 45 x 30 inches.
For this exhibition, Kim combines his interest in the colonial histories of landscape with the political underpinnings of the Olympic games. The 1988 Olympics in Seoul were perhaps a missed opportunity for reconciliation between North and South Korea. In the summer of 1986, the governments of North and South Korea in Pyongyang and Seoul, respectively, were in talks to share the games between the divided nations. [1] Following the first World War, the United States and the Soviet Union had claimed sovereignty over the Korean peninsula. With the U.S. supporting the South and the Soviet Union supporting the North, the neighboring regions were arbitrarily pitted against each other. This lasted from 1945 until 1950, culminating in the outbreak of the Korean War when the North invaded the South, the aftermath of which directly correlates to the political tensions on the peninsula today. In 1981, the International Olympic Committee selected Seoul to host the games. North Korean leader Kim Il-sung communicated his desire to share the events with South Korea, a compromise in which both countries were initially invested. In essence, with half the events held in Pyongyang and the other half in Seoul, the two nations could symbolically overcome their fraught past and the colonial vestiges of their division. Whatever reconciliation the games might have brought was lost by 1987, when talks between the two nations broke down. Among other reasons, North Korea’s allies, China and the Soviet Union, were not willing to boycott the games and risk alienating South Korea, which had seen an unprecedented economic boom in the 1980s, as well as a swift turn toward authoritarian politics. Such a move might have also provoked the U.S. amid the geopolitical tension of the Cold War. In the end, North Korea would not host a single event, but would retaliate through military intervention and escalation.
Growing up in South Korea in the 1980s, Kim remembers being instilled with the idea of virtuous self-sacrifice. He grapples with this concept equally in his work and his life. He describes this ethos as a consequence of Japanese imperialist attitudes adopted by Korea during their occupation in the early twentieth century. The idea of overcoming physical limits at great personal cost transferred into practices of post-war conscription and labor that emphasize a devotional work ethic. Over time, Kim has found new meaning and magnitude in this kind of bodily sacrifice and the physical fragility we all grapple with at one point or another in our lives. In one of his sculptures, he uses plaster molds of his own body parts, implicating himself in his work.
What Kim saw in Seoul during the 1988 Olympics was a different kind of bodily offering: a performative participation. Individuals were required to leave their homes to celebrate the games, and by extension, the spirit of what they stood for. The agency of the body, particularly that of the athlete, is similarly lost amid authoritarian power structures. A contemporary example of an athlete navigating similar power dynamics can be found in Colin Kaepernick, formerly of the San Francisco 49ers, who kneeled during the national anthem for the 2016 football season in protest of police brutality. The subsequent distortion of his message by Donald Trump and the National Football League transformed a response to racial inequality into an act of political dissonance.
The 1988 Olympics have become a kind of timestamp for Kim. The sleek modernity of his memorabilia documents a pivotal moment in which South Korea transitioned into a global power modeled after the fetishized West. The ways in which the South Korean government maximized their newfound international recognition was not readily apparent to the young artist. But the zeitgeist of the 1980s and the overall ethos of the games—the sense of ceremony, sacrifice, and honor shared by the athletes and citizens alike—lives on as a cultural legacy. By contextualizing his experience of the games, Kim reflects upon the sociopolitical forces that shape our collective memories. In co-opting the bodies of its citizens, South Korea continues to reinforce a nationalistic ideology, in which the value of the individual is outweighed by that of the state, a concept that contradicts the purported centrality of the self in Western culture. In these systems, to use Kim’s words, “your body does not matter.” Memorabilia represents merely one aspect of the legacy brought about by the 1988 Olympics, but for Kim, this shared history is inseparable from personal identity.
[1] See Sergey Radchenko, Sport and Politics on the Korean Peninsula: North Korea and the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Washington DC: North Korea International Documentation Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2011.
This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season.
Re’al Christian is a New York-based writer and art historian. She is a contributor to various publications including Art in America, Art Papers, Art in Print, The Brooklyn Rail, and BOMB Magazine. She is a Curatorial Fellow at the Hunter College Art Galleries, and an MA candidate in Art History and Curatorial Studies at Hunter College. She earned her bachelor’s degree from New York University, where she double majored in Art History and Media, Culture, and Communication Studies.
Mentor Sara Reisman is Executive and Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, where she has recently organized exhibitions including To Cast Too Bold a Shadow, Revolution from Without, The Watchers, and Relational Economies: Labor over Capital, among others. Recent book projects include Mobilizing Pedagogy: Two Projects in the Americas by Pablo Helguera and Suzanne Lacy with Pilar Riaño-Alcalá (Amherst College Press), and Elia Alba: The Supper Club (Hirmer Publishers), both in 2019. From 2008 to 2014, Reisman was director of New York City’s Percent for Art program, commissioning permanent public artworks by Xu Bing, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Pablo Helguera, and Jeffrey Gibson, among others. Reisman has worked in curatorial roles at the Queens Museum (2008), the New Museum (2005-2006), and the Philadelphia ICA (2004-2005). She was a 2011 Critic-in-Residence at Art Omi; a 2013 Marica Vilcek Curatorial Fellow in Kosovo, Macedonia, and Bulgaria; and a 2020 Artslink Fellow in St. Petersburg. Reisman has taught art history and curatorial practice at the University of Pennsylvania, SUNY Purchase, and since 2016, the School of Visual Arts.