We are delighted to announce Echoes, Sooun Kim’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will open during Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art.

Sooun Kim 김수언 (b. 1989 South Korea) is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Glasgow working with music, video, and painting.

In the exhibition Echoes, Kim’s visual language is seen in his paintings and beautifully crafted films. Drawn from an image bank relating to popular culture and personal narratives, Kim offers a reflection on his past and present relationship to his home town of Jeju, and new chosen city of Glasgow. Included in Echoes are two films that are audio-visual portraits; a South-Korean artist experiencing Scottish culture. In these films the characters are exploring histories that collide with the present, in particular is Kim’s own association to the past occupation of the Korean peninsula and how this impacts on the following generations. By evoking cultural heritage in both places through time, place and memories, the future becomes a reimagined mix of history, science, fantasy and hyper realism. These two different cultures, as experienced by the artist, clash with the homogenization of our increasing global world as the artist explores the potential of cultural hybrid futures.

Consciously unpredictable, Kim uses image and sound to play with viewer expectations by seducing and repulsing. He is amplifying the tendency for musical and cultural elements to interact with each other, often defying previously established genre distinctions. Between screens and across the white primed surfaces on his canvas, morphing shapes of almost recognisable imagery appear menacingly. Kim uses oil paint on canvas to capture and mix these images as fleeting moments between time and space. Titles such as Ante Meridiem and Post Meridiem allude to the possible extension of the transitional state of consciousness between wakefulness and the day's end, where involuntary and imagined experiences have the potential of becoming the new reality.

Kim is a recent MFA graduate from The Glasgow School of Art, and a recipient of the Nottingham Trent University Exchange Programme, School of Art & Design. He received a BFA in Painting, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, KR.

Sooun Kim: Echoes

7 June - 6 july 2024