PhonicAphonic: On Kim
On Kim has long focused on the book as an object, developing a sustained body of work around it. Drawing from the immaterial elements that books generate, such as text and sound, she combines them in various ways to create new sensory connections. Her practice spans performance, sound, video, installation, and print, freely crossing media. These works reconfigure basic acts associated with books; reading, listening, and writing, into diverse forms of communication. At times, she collaborates with poets and novellists, exploring points of contact between literature and visual art.
In her solo exhibition at Gallery Chosun, Kim investigates the possibility and impossibility of communication through letters that are not voiced. The exhibition title 《PhonicAphonic》 merges the adjective phonic meaning related to sound or voice, with aphonic, meaning without voice or sound. The exhibition presents works composed of documents, sounds, and poems, carefully arranged alongside difficult-to-read Korean characters that appear only at moments of error. Together, these works invite reflection on the limits of reading and communication when sound is absent.
The tradition of privileging speech over writing; photocentrism, has long assumed that letters are always to be read. On Kim combines letters that have lost their voice, existing like exiles at the margins of this tradition, to create sensations of “seeing with the ear” or “hearing with the eye”.
Artist’s Note
She establishes a functionally occupied space for language in its formal, visual sense. Letters that exist in literary lineages yet remain unreadable, letters that have not been assigned a role or function, letters that cannot be recorded or are difficult to articulate. These appear as errors before vanishing like ghosts or mirages. She transforms these letters, stripped of corporeality and meaning, into text and into the act of reading aloud, participation in an auditory circulation and immaterial, unintended diffusion of sound, as well as in a planned distribution of sonic experience.