SPACE May 2025 (No. 690)
Exhibition view of ‘Plot, Blop, Plop’ ©Kim Hyerin
On Mar. 21, the media artist Ayoung Kim, the recipient of the LG Guggenheim Award and the first Korean to receive the honour, opened her solo exhibition ‘Plot, Blob, Plop’ at Atelier Hermès. The exhibition features her latest video work, AI-Mater Plot 1991 (2025), which blends video, sound, sculptural elements inspired by abstracted apartment blueprints, and objects referencing Gulf War map symbols. Together, these components explore the collective memory and broader history tied to the Al-Matar Apartments in Saudi Arabia, Riyadh. The Al-Mater Apartments were built in the 1980s and constructed by the Hanyang Corporation, who Kim’s father once worked for. Uniquely, the apartments have a history of serving as a shelter for the displaced Kuwaitis during the Gulf War in 1991. The 28m 30s video piece features the voices of the artist and others reminiscing about the apartments, including personal memories from the artist of her father, who was stationed in the Middle East. These memories are visualised through various media technologies: photographs, generative AI video-to-video conversion, LiDAR scans, 3D Gaussian splatting, game engine animations, and 2D archival animations—all of which work together to reconstruct the Al-Matar Apartments. The artwork fabricates a speculative and fictional space that departs from the real, still-standing structure. Kim expands this fictionalised reconstruction into a meditation on the historical narratives mediated by oil. The exhibition runs until Jun. 1.