Kim Haemin

Kim Haemin (, born 1957 in Daejeon, South Korea) is a media artist currently living and working in Seoul, South Korea. One of the only Korean artists who has remained active in media art from the late 1980s to the present, Kim has consistently pursued video installations that bridge experience of virtuality and physical reality, often in ways that, according to the art theorist Min Huijeong, stood outside contemporaneous conceptions of video as a purely imaginary or cognitive realm.

Kim began working with video following his exposure in the mid-1980s to works by and articles on the artist Nam June Paik. Kim's first experiments were a series of media performances, which he staged between 1987 and 1990 as part of art festivals in Daejeon, Seoul, and Japan. Furthermore, incorporating a device that responded to sound by rocking the pedestal back and forth,

Sindoan (1994) A video installation, Sindoan was named after the area south of Gyeryongsan that was once designated an early capital of the Joseon dynasty. The work presented several video monitors arranged throughout a gallery space (some stand against the walls, others are face-up on the floor). At the center is a brush that stands before an audio speaker, with a video camera recording their interaction. Over the course of work, the brush vibrates with the music emitted by the speaker—a recording of gayageum. The video camera records these movements, which are in turn displayed live upon the various monitors and look like a flickering candle flame.

Sindoan bridges conceptions of the brush as a tool for communication and the candle as a medium between man and the divine in religious and ritual practices. (monograph, 68) It also demonstrates Kim Haemin's early interest in shamanism—particularly in how an artist is akin to the shaman by mediating the real and the imaginary—which he continued to explore across many later works.

Unreasonable Alibi (1999) Among Kim's first works to use projection instead of CRT video monitors, Unreasonable Alibi was a video installation of two screens with red and blue lightbulbs suspended between them. Over the course of the work, Kim Haemin appears wearing different costumes, from traditional robes of Confucian scholars and Buddhist monks to a modern-day suit and tie. Over the course of the work, these different versions of the artist appear to interact with each other across the screens and also respond to the lightbulbs that hang between them and turn on or off in concert with the figures' seeming interaction.

Carrying forward Kim's the staging techniques for multiple channels of video and use of light bulbs that Kim explored throughout the 1990s, Unreasonable Alibi staged a conversation of cultural symbolism across its different costumes and its red and blue lights (which allude to the dualities such as yin and yang as well as Korean flags). It also illustrated Kim's deep and longstanding interest in the worldviews that have fundamentally shaped modern-day Korean society. Created in the wake of the IMF crisis in South Korea and just before the turn of the millennium, Unreasonable Alibi is a self portrait of the artist that evokes the broader identity conflicts of its time.

50-second Rendering (2003) Kim Haemin composed 50-second Rendering by clipping television footage of North and South Korean families who reunited upon the 50th anniversary of the 1953 Armistice Agreement. The work stages these clips across two screens, adjoined at a right angle. Rapidly repeated, the clips of the families' emotional gestures of (such as waving or embracing) not only accentuates their effusive-yet-distraught reactions, but also the brevity of their long-awaited reunions. Similarly paradoxical, the work's running time is very short (only 50 seconds) despite the artist's labor-intensive editing process, which is underscored by the installation's soundtrack of what sounds like a whirring hard-drive.