Kyung-jin Kim: Wishful Thinking

 

Thomas Hunter Project Space is pleased to present Kyung-jin Kim: Wishful Thinking.

By embodying old and new protocols, Wishful Thinking by Kyung-jin Kim opens a space where disruption can be a life- affirming intervention. The exhibition is an engineered environment that introduces text, objects, and movement as sites of speculation. Each artwork stands as a portrait of the mechanics of belief.

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Today we find ourselves rethinking a deeply wounded world. The inability to see how our crises interconnect has fortified fear-based othering and escalated nationalisms as coping mechanisms. As alienation and violence against Asian- Americans amplified throughout the global pandemic, the individual and collective need for secondary witnessing has heightened. We seek acknowledgement of our traumas. We search for a community that shares our values and fulfills our need for belonging, sometimes overriding scientific proof and reason.

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In a radically playful way, Kim weaves these experiences, questions, and sensations into his kinetic practice. His installations brilliantly materialize diagrams of culturally coded humor, translating through them a range of social and bureaucratized intentions. Devices rubbing, shaking, and crawling mimic the mechanics of uncertainty and create a suspension of belief for the viewer. In (fin)ish, a spinning Nerf dart creates the sound of an approaching missile, shaking the ‘parasite’ arm into reaction. In (burn)ish, the rubbing of a glass orb alludes to a fortune teller whose message is burnt into a wooden ball that says “-ish at the end of everything and you’ll always be right”. A sculpture titled Wishful Thinking features a device stuck in the mud making marks, being lifted up and moved into another place in the arena. The expressiveness of these devices is so seductive that control becomes less detectable.

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Each title contains the suffix -ish, which means belonging to, near, or approximate. intentionally amplifies the normalized vagueness of the language which can be used to avoid accountability and propel a leap of faith. In a poetic way, we are invited to reflect upon what moves us and how. What directs and commodifies our belief and will throughout periods of great fear, anxiety, and militarization? Where are the cracks in which we can plant imaginative seeds and what prevents us from doing so?

 

- Nataša Prljević, April, 2022

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Nataša Prljević is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker. Prljević works collaboratively and collectively developing practice that intersects art, feminist organizing, and radical pedagogy. Initiator of HEKLER, a transnational platform that fosters collective examination of hospitality and conflict through art programming, open education, residencies, and archiving.