Haeju Kim

Photo: Haeju Kim

Haeju Kim is a curator based in Seoul, currently working as the deputy director of Art Sonje Center. The exhibitions and performance programmes she has organized have demonstrated her interests in the body, movement, and in memory and the recording of memory. Kim curated The Island of the Colorblind (Art Sonje Center, 2019); Resonance of a sad smile: Lee Kit (Art Sonje Center, 2019); Pinch-to-zoom: Julien Previeux (Art Sonje Center, 2018); Point Counter Point (Art Sonje Center, 2019); Moving / Image (Seoul Art Space Mullae 2016; Arko Art Center 2017); The Society of choreography (Nam June Paik Art Center 2015); Once is not enough (AVP 2014); Memorial Park (Palais de Tokyo as part of Nouvelles Vagues, 2013); and Theater of Sand (Culture Station 284, as part of Play Time, 2012), among others. She has worked as a researcher at the National Theater Company of Korea (2011-2012) and as an assistant curator at the Nam June Paik Art Center (2008).

“Tell me a story, Dance me a move”

Haeju Kim invites three artists—Ayoung Kim, Jee-Ae Lim, and Genevieve Quick—and introduces their different approaches to the issue of migration. Tell me a story, Dance me a move looks to use the practice of constructing narratives to express the complex emotions and situations intrinsic to the experience of migration. The three artists of Tell me a story, Dance me a move are individually involved in historical research, interviews, on-site investigations, and other examinations of fact, while at the same time introducing stories, rooted in the issue of migration, created through their artistic interpretations and imagination.

Ayoung Kim's new work, Porosity Vallery: Portable Hole 2, is mainly based on her research in Mongolia and among refugees living in South Korea. With this project, Kim attempts an allegorical, symbolic shift in the concepts of geopolitics, folktales, of minerals and other materials, taking into account migrations in East Asia (including North and South Korea and Mongolia), to present a microcosm in which real-world agents and elements are transported and reconstructed in unrealistic ways. With Mountain, Tree, Cloud and Tiger, Jee-Ae Lim addresses the discourse of post-exoticism in transmigrant society by means of traditional and contemporary dance languages. The performance version will be presented at Sophiensaele in Berlin; the video documentation, along with the photographs and documents collected, will be presented for the project exhibition in Gwangju. In the video installation and dance performance Planet Celadon: Our Receiver Is Operating, Genevieve Quick imagines Asian American identity through a science fiction narrative that explores the challenges of communicating with a distant place and culture. Embracing her own hybridity and displacement, Quick imagines the Asian American experience as not just a global immigration phenomenon, but an interplanetary migration.