Alexandra Kleiman
Korean artist Minouk Lim uses video as an intermediary between the real and the imaginary, the actual and the irrational, and she harbors its ability to freely raise questions that movies are too bowdlerized to ask. Her 2005 video New Town Ghost (via a rap delivered from the back of a pickup truck) on the rapidly changed conditions of the Yeongdeungpo-gu administrative district in southwest Seoul where the artist lived until recently. The area underwent significant development with the city’s “New Town Project” initiated in 2002; Lim interrogates the social implications of South Korea’s modernization and land supremacy, positioning common citizen as ghost. She activates the medium as a malleable, utopian umbrella, incorporating her declarative poetic writing as well as performance, music, and clips of other videos into her works, constructing alternative political and ideological realities, ones which she aims to have “motivate the memory.”
The artist espouses a maxim delivered in Godard’s Le Petit Soldat: “Ethics is the aesthetics of the future.” Lim’s investigation of the ethics of art and the art of ethics is one that remains rife with possibility. The Walker Art Center will open the first solo American museum exhibition of her work May 31.
Minouk Lim, New Town Ghost (video still), 2005. Courtesy Walker Art Center.
Minouk Lim, S.O.S-Adoptive Dissensus (performance), 2009. Courtesy Walker Art Center.
Minouk Lim, The Weight of Hands (video still), 2010. Courtesy The Walker Art Center.
Minouk Lim, The Weight of Hands (video still), 2010. Courtesy The Walker Art Center.
Minouk Lim, The Weight of Hands (video still), 2010. Courtesy The Walker Art Center.
