Notes on Alcoholism

_AV Buddha_ (2022), is an extensive kinetic sound installation in the form of a Buddha figure. Archive material on the horrors of the Korean War is presented on small mobile screens that make up the Buddha's face. The contrast between the spiritual and the mechanical is central: in the black-and-white films, we are confronted with marginalized groups that history has overlooked, while the Buddha figure is brought to life in a mechanical symphony, only to then fall silent. Hankyul links the work to the contemporary mediation of disasters and mass death, where the short time horizon in social media leaves no room for slow and more time-consuming processes such as grief. The title _AV Buddha_ refers to the iconic work _TV Buddha_ (1974) by the South Korean artist Nam June Paik, which, among other things, thematizes the relationship between East and West, religion and media society, surveillance and control.

AV Buddha

Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor and author, speaks in his memoirs : 'When one is dying, one is much too busy to think about death. All one’s organism is devoted to breathing. (...)… suicide is born from a feeling of guilt that no punishment has attenuated.’ 

‘Notes on Survival’ is created to embody the sensation of survival which is so precarious that a body forgets the choice of demise. The sculptural gestures are made from discarded industrial materials and tangled into hair and bones, which often are the only living evidence that identifies the dead and anonymous. The work remains in a state of permanent prostration and debasement, and is neither dead nor alive. However, by persisting to occupy a space and continuing transient time, it seeks to form a political statement that leads to reflection on the political subordination of the present and future tense.

Notes on Survival

Forest_Sound_Motor_Machine.mov (documentation video)

Kim Hankyul's project Forest\_Sound\_Motor\_ Machine.mov is a multi­media installation that travels across dimen­sions and resolutions, reality and simul­ation, sound and visuals. The exhibition acti­vely adapts disso­nance as its main method of expres­sion, questioning the truth­ful­ness of media, that is, the platform of repre­sen­tation for culture and identities that we most famil­iar­ly encounter in our daily lives. The work sonically mimics a soundscape of forest, built from a war veteran’s interview and his recounts on the events of death and injuries in forest drills. Detached percep­tion of reality following the repe­ti­tive screening of those events is embodied in the work through inconsistent and inauth­entic ripoffs to imitate a forest.

Forest_Sound_Motor_Machine.mov

M.Butterfly Vol.2: Death Proof thematises both global political fantasies of great power and questions of gender identity. Kim Hankyul takes up these motifs, detaches them from the narrative obligations of theatre and transforms them into a game of allusions and free associations and the choreography of robotic movement sequences.
  
  
https://esc.mur.at/en/projekt/mbutterfly-vol2-death-proof

M.Butterfly Vol.2 : Death Proof

Bones of the Time We Have Not Entered Yet

Maman by Louise Petite-Bourgeois

‘The Temple of the Golden Pavilion’ is a kinetic architecture in which the soundscape of wildfire is depicted through the motion of burnt timber and domestic objects. Based on the half-fictional story written by Mishima Yukio in the same title, in which a young clergyman puts fire on a temple from the frustration of not being able to own the beauty of it, the psychological landscape of fetish, desire, violence and euphoria is depicted in the feasible picture that surrounds the bodies within. The overall structure of the architecture was designed on the basis of the real image of the temple in Japan taken in the event of fire, while the inner construction of moving frames was creatively devised for the purpose of generating wanted sound outcome. The sound was made in mimetic resemblance to the sound of burning flames in tandem with the explosive emission of energy, removing the inside and outside of the architectural space through the motion of ephemerality.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Serpent (documentation video)

In the work **_‘Flight of the Bumblebee’_**, a classic music written by Rimsky-Korsakov in the same title is presented in a mechanical remake. By attributing each musical note into a separate vibration motor and using window panes as the speakers, the flow of bumblebees is realised in a vocal soundscape that surrounds the whole space.

Flight of the Bumblebee (documentation video)

The kinetic sound installation **_Jazz by Jazz_** aims to reproduce the syncopated sound of jazz through mechanical movement. In music, syncopation is defined as several rhythms played simultaneously, interrupting the regular flow of the beat.

Microphones are attached to different parts of several sculptural mechanisms, allowing sound to be amplified throughout the gallery space. Water condenses on a hot plate, causing a hissing sound. A vacuum cleaner activates a harmonica which is moved up and down in front of the vacuum hose by a motor. A water dispenser drips onto a microphone enveloped in plastic, creating regular, fast-paced percussion. In another part of the installation, rhythmic percussion is created by water droplets hitting two metal bowls, suspended at different heights.

Imperfections in each mechanism allow the rhythm of the soundscape to flow in and out of sync at random in real-time, thereby reproducing the unpredictable, syncopated rhythms of live improvised jazz. In conventional thinking, mechanical processes should be as predictable and clockwork-like as possible, thereby avoiding “bad” outcomes such as disproportionate wear on certain parts or stoppages in production processes. Instead, **_Jazz by Jazz_** focuses on the factors such as erroneous movement and sound, loss of systematic control and unpredictability as creative forces rather than indications of failure.

Jazz by Jazz (documentation video)

**_'Anything that isn’t Evolving is Dead'_** is a compositional set of musical automata that narrates deeply personal stories in the format of whispering. Departing from the anonymity of whispering that puts veils on age, name, ethnicity and gender, the real-life tales are narrated as a musical soliloquy with the instruments played by machine motions. Narrated tales have been collected over the years since 2018 from randomly chosen narrators, through the interview process without having fixed measures other than the format of whispering and the first question ‘What did you do on last Christmas?’. The format, working as a temporary device for building intimacy, has brought out a number of non-linear, retrograde stories from the individuals which summed up into the topics around death, disease, love, jealousy and accidents. Following each storyline, an individual music note was written and played out of the set of musical instruments with the ready-made objects and the casts of body parts. Through the loose navigation of tales and physical objects that fall out of developmental centres, the social telos of linear development are constantly replaced with the multiplicity of side-growing identities. The project is still ongoing without an end date, and the documentation video shows one set of a tale and a musical composition created in 2021.

Anything That isn't Evolving is Dead (documentation video)

In the work <The Tempest>, the soundscape of natural turmoil is cinematically realised through the sequential reflex of raw material. The formidable power of nature is sonically depicted in constant variations, by the sound made out of minimal motion of machineries. Atmospheric depiction of the sound is elaborated through the interactive light installation, which provides a prelude for each sonic sequence that follows. 

The work has stemmed from linguistic intention of creating a lexical gap between the non-consistent audio-visual experience, utilising the sonic force to expand the ocularcentric field of vision. Clinical look of the display outlined by cold industrial objects is expected to distance watchers from the dramatic pathos of sonic happenings, at an immediate instance of physical immersion.

The Tempest (documentation video)

**_‘M.Butterfly’_** is a sound kinetic theatre project where the theatric bodies and props are built to play automatic masquerade of gender bending theatre performance. Through the form of a traditional Beijing theatre ‘Peking theatre’ where the female roles are played by male actors, it will be interrogated how hegemonically the images of gender and Orient have been built and reproduced in Western patriarchal society. The gender bending role of a protagonist is presented through the perpetual performance by machinic assemblage, on the theatre setting built on the mystifying perspective of Western onlookers toward unknown Oriental bodies. The work was presented in KRAFT Bergen in 2022, as a solo exhibition.

M. Butterfly (documentation video)

**_AV Buddha_ (2022),** is an extensive kinetic sound installation in the form of a Buddha figure. Archive material on the horrors of the Korean War is presented on small mobile screens that make up the Buddha's face. The contrast between the spiritual and the mechanical is central: in the black-and-white films, we are confronted with marginalized groups that history has overlooked, while the Buddha figure is brought to life in a mechanical symphony, only to then fall silent. Hankyul links the work to the contemporary mediation of disasters and mass death, where the short time horizon in social media leaves no room for slow and more time-consuming processes such as grief. The title _AV Buddha_ refers to the iconic work _TV Buddha_ (1974) by the South Korean artist Nam June Paik, which, among other things, thematizes the relationship between East and West, religion and media society, surveillance and control.

AV Buddha (documentation video)

The work **_Olympia (of the Abused look and of False Consciousness)_**presents an

immersive installation where virtual and physical domains intersect in a landscape of screens, forms and gestures, rich with references, the most explicit being Dancing Baby (1996) (coined the first viral meme), computer icons, and Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), which positioned lower-class bodies to the fore and as the holders of gaze.

Additionally, the kinetic sculptures constructed in steel build up a real-time soundscape,

merging with personal recordings. We are invited to uncover new protocols of subjectivity

based on ‘user identities’ in the spectacle of overlaid dimensions.

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Kim Hankyul