Heecheon Kim
Deep in the Forking Tanks
Art Sonje Center
Seoul

Featuring a single, monolithic screen with the video projected onto its center, the exhibition commenced with a disorienting, pitch-black corridor illuminated by a sparse row of minute lightbulbs on the ground. Such immersive darkness was hardly unprecedented or inventive, but it was a remarkably well-executed formal device that served as an apt prelude to Kim’s submarine forays. The video introduces sensory-deprivation tanks—pod-shaped structures that are impervious to external stimuli and filled with body-temperature saltwater that allows the supine user inside to float effortlessly—as sites where multiple registers of sensory confusion are possible. In his characteristically juvenile voice, Kim reads from a Spanish text outlining the effects of these tanks on the human body: Blinking extremely slowly within the tank can induce a disjunction between the sense of sight and movements of the eye. A diver deep in the ocean might have a similar experience should her lights start to malfunction.

And yet such sensory entanglements are not merely hypothetical. The narrator’s initial monologue is followed by his own account of searching for the remains of a colleague who went missing in the ocean. During a simulated underwater training scenario constructed from the day she disappeared, Kim experiences acute physical trauma as his body presumes that the situation is real. In another sequence, Kim confesses to a friend that portions of the training session that he cannot recall feel as if they are his actual experienced past. Interspersed throughout the video are a series of digitally feminized, pixelated video selfies of the artist standing in a bathroom and roaming around parks, further complicating the already porous boundaries between the real and the virtual. Jumbled perception deep in the tanks therefore extends into a metaphor for the human experience in the age of manipulable reality.

Halfway through the video, Kim introduces a devoted group of Mexican K-pop fans, for whom re-enacting the regimented, synchronized choreography of Korean bands offers an opportunity to “leave their bodies.” The fan club declares a “Day of Automation,” involving an uncanny, flash-mob-style performance in which the amateur troupe replicates the slick, quasi-militaristic moves of their idols in front of a Pizza Hut during a hail storm in Mexico City. Their fanatic movements are an attempt to push the sensations of the body to the point where reality and representation can no longer be distinguished, as if merging with the digitally mediated world of their favorite K-pop videos. To trace the validity of such extreme physical conditions is a tricky endeavor, as few would be able to attest to the experience of perceptual disorder in a sensory-deprivation tank, let alone the near-impossible task of utterly losing bodily sensations through mirroring the impeccable moves of K-pop stars. And yet by grounding his work in the perceptual realm, Kim reminds us that our experiences of technology are still decidedly physical, despite the recurrent focus on the virtual sphere in recent artistic production. After all, even at the onset of the new decade, we still touch, swipe, and scroll through our screens.