Minouk Lim

Minouk Lim (born 1968) is a South Korean multimedia artist, and documentary filmmaker. She has had exhibitions at such institutes as National Museum of Fine Arts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Walker Art Center, and the Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum.

Early life and education Lim was born in Daejeon, South Korea. At a young age, Lim moved to Seoul. She entered an art competition sponsored by the Little Angels where she was given an award as well as a scholarship for the art school. She enrolled at Ewha Womans University in 1985 to study painting.

Career Lim started showing her work in South Korea in the late 1990s. In 1998, she created the installation Bus Stop for the exhibition City and Image: Food, Clothing, Shelter. The work was centered around the bus stop billboards in South Korea after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Many of the billboards were left blank. Lim placed non-commercial images in the billboards with the attempt to draw attention to the types of images consumed by the public.

Lim's video work New Ghost Town (2005) focuses on Yeongdeungpo and the redevelopment project set in place by the Seoul Metropolitan Government.

S.O.S-Adoptive Dissensus (2009) is a site-specific video work by Lim; it chronicles a ferry's trip down the Han River. The ferry passes three different events, protesters resisting urban development around the river, lovers taunting the ferry, and a political prisoner signaling S.O.S. such as, industrialization and language. Some of her work investigates concepts of language, its fragile nature, and miscommunication.

Lim developed a body of work that critiques the social and political conditions of a contemporary society fueled by growth and development. She calls it "the ghosts of modernization," in which she responds to the loss of belonging and place. Her work is displayed with the lines of aesthetics and politics. And in recent years, Lim discovered a distinct visual language that combines her interest in performance, video and documentary.

Her intended meanings behind her work are sometimes behind the philosophy of the impossible to become possible. She strives for the idea in that everything is speaking. Sometimes things can consist of sayability yet some things are to be unsayable. But that is her perspective in communication that she wants to portray towards her audiences. With this, she has the ability to freely express her thoughts and the ability to say no.

Major exhibitions Jump Cut, ArtSonje Center, Seoul, Korea 2008 Liquide Commune_Minouk Lim, PKM Gallery, Seoul, Korea 2011 Perspective, Freer/Sakler Gallery_Smithsonian Museum, Washington D.C, U.S.A 2011 Minouk Lim: Heat of Shadows, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, U.S.A 2012 Hyde Park Art Center Residency Program, Chicago, U.S.A 2013 Navigation ID, 10th Gwangju Biennale, Korea 2014 FireCliff5, Minouk Lim solo exhibition, PORTIKUS, Frankfurt, Germany 2015 Minouk LIM solo exhibition, PLATEAU, Seoul, Korea 2015 From X to A, Community-Performativity Project, Asia Culture Complex, Gwangju, Korea 2015

Awards and nominations Albert Rocheron Foundation Prize, Paris, France 1995 Gwangju Biennale Gwangju Bank Prize, Korea 2006 Hermès Foundation Missulsang, Seoul, Korea 2007 Media Art Korea Award, Seoul, Korea 2010