Soun Gui KIM, Situation Plastique II – Manifestation Cerfs-volants, 1971-1973, video installation, super 8 mm film, Courtesy to the artist

Soun Gui Kim, Sek-Don poème, 1983, Courtesy to the artist

Soun Gui Kim, Vide&o, 1989, installation, ice video concert, Courtesy to the artist

The multidisciplinary oeuvre of French-Korean artist Soun Gui Kim spans across places and times. For more than half a century, her practice has forged connections between South Korea and France, as well as with the United States and Germany, while demonstrating her ongoing interest in discovering different techniques and experimenting with conceptual innovation. Her art draws on a dual philosophical grounding: Eastern thought, with which she is intimately familiar, and Western philosophy, enriched by her extensive intellectual dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida. At the heart of this approach lies an in-depth reflection on the nature of language, informed by her training in semiotics and her predilection for creative processes.

Exhibition view Lazy Clouds, 2022, ZKM, Karlsruhe (2022-2023), Courtesy to the artist

Exhibition view Lazy Clouds, 2022, ZKM, Karlsruhe (2022-2023), Courtesy to the artist

One of her recent solo exhibitions, the retrospective “Lazy Clouds” – staged at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea in 2019 and later at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in 2022−2023 – illustrated her conception of identity as something both abstract and tangible. Like a cloud, an entity without fixed boundaries, S. Kim resists any stable form of categorisation. Elusive and mobile, she sidesteps identity labels (woman, migrant, Korean, person of colour, Asian) and artistic classifications (painter, draughtswoman, sculptor, photographer, performer, video artist, installation artist), continually reinventing herself. The word “shapeshifter” aptly conveys the fluidity at the core of her work.

The notion of “stupidity” forms another central pillar of her philosophy, running through several of her creations that the artist herself describes as “stupid” – from the pinhole photographs she began making in the late 1980s to her recent works featuring the robot Yeong Hee reciting poetry. For S. Kim, ignorance is a strength in that, unlike knowledge, it has no limits.

Soun Gui Kim, Nuages, 1973, Courtesy to the artist

Soun Gui Kim, Silence of the Well, 2010, sound installation, Courtesy to the artist

Active in France since the early 1970s, she has left a lasting mark on the art scene not only through her practice but also through her teaching. She points out that she was amongst the first to incorporate computers and new media into teaching methods applied at art schools in southern France. Her work also stands out for its strong collaborative nature. She has worked with major figures of international contemporary art, such as Nam June Paik and John Cage, as well as with her students and those close to her, with whom she created some of her most iconic installations, including Situation Plastique III (1973) and Forest Poems (2021).

When I visited her studio in March 2026, S. Kim showed me an early video that she considers one of her most powerful works. Made in 1982, Soun Gui Kim est Absente Aujourd’hui consists of a sequence of dates, each followed by the eponymous phrase, repeated like a mantra. She explained that this work encapsulates her current feeling: in France today, she perceives herself as absent. Yet in the year of her eightieth birthday, she has received AWARE’s Outstanding Merit prize, which suggests that this “absence” stems less from an institutional reality than from a subjective experience of time.