MINHEE KANG

2022, factory2, Seoul, South Korea

Real-time video segmentation, webcam, TV main board, computer, wifi-router, LED, barrisol, liquid crystal display, DMX controller, speaker, MDF, Plexiglas

Work Process Documentation🔗

A Vast in Z (2022) aims to manifest humanity’s ordinary nature: moving forward, physically, and metaphysically, travelling from A to Z, from nowhere to somewhere unknown. This project captures people walking down the street in real-time, and transforms their movements into a phenomenological shift of light and darkness in an enclosed space.

The live video capturing people moving down the street is processed using an Image Segmentation algorithm that separates figure from ground. The data of the masked human figure in each frame is translated into an analogous shadow, displayed on transparent media windows and light systems on the ceiling.

The ’window’ is a transparent medium made of liquid-crystal display (LCD) crafted from LED TV screens. Exploring the LCD, which operates by light transmission from a backlit source, I spatialized this system by replacing the LED panel with a light wall positioned at a distance. The LCD not only projects the graphics on to the screen, but also provides a quality of transparency, revealing any objects behind the surface that obscures the light source. Transcending the limitations of flat digital surfaces that display graphical representations in pixels, I aim to expand the representation into the physical periphery, immersing the viewer in a dynamic interplay of light and shadow. As figures pass by on the road, their transfigured shadow images on the screen are not only displayed as a graphical representation but also as metaphorical clouds, obscuring the sunlight behind, and thus bringing shifting light and darkness—transitions between day and night—into the room.

The manipulation of shadow figures in the artificially designed, empty white space of the installation is inspired by Marc Auge’s concept of ‘non-place’, which refers to today’s new form of solitude characterised by a proliferation of anthropological spaces of transience, where human beings remain anonymous. I seek to highlight the fleeting virtue of relationality, intimately connected to identity at both the societal and individual level, in capturing the speed and directional energy of these people simply passing by.

*Supported and sponsored by Arts Council Korea (ARKO) Art&Tech Platform

Acknowledgements:
Data visualization: Kohui
Data transmission: Hyunchul Kim
Sound design: Kyuchul Moon
Documentation: Hyunseok Lee

2022, Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA)

Video collaged documentation
Real-time video segmentation, projector, speaker, silk

Work Process Documentation🔗

A Vast in Z: White Screen (2022) was a live performance that experimented connecting two different locations in real time. The project incorporates the white screen which becomes a liminal surface where two physical places meet.

The people walking down the street are transformed into the shifting shadows projected onto the screen, enclosing the performer on stage to disappear into the crowds as they pass by.

For a better implication of the simultaneity of interaction between two sites, two separate videos were converged into one for documenting this project.

*Supported and sponsored by Arts Council Korea (ARKO) Art&Tech Platform, Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA)

Acknowledgements:
Performer: Junhwan Huh
Videography: Eunhyoung Ju

2021, Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, South Korea

Projectors, silk, velvet, steel, curtain rails, temperature and humidity sensor, Arduino board, computer, wifi-router, tablet for remote control, 3D printed case for sensor and battery, face-covering Interactive media installation

Work Process Documentation🔗

uːm (2021) is an interactive media installation in which the data of breathing — inhaling and exhaling — are turned into landscape that is projected onto the space in real-time. The immaterial qualities of an enclosed space—light, air, and breath – are collected in a span of time to create an axis for a poetic and subjective time-space. The audience experiences an expansion of themselves spatially as the room transforms along with the rhythm of their breathing. The work draws on the idea of a homologous relationship between the macrocosm of nature and the microcosm of the human body, as depicted in the Oriental myth of Heaven and Earth’s creation. And in terms of contemporary resonance, it represents an empowered 21st century humanity undertaking the role of God as creator amidst fast-developing technology.

The work comprises a soft boundary in space built with fabrics — black velvet outside and white silk in the inner layer — which respond to the subtle air movements in space. One person at a time, the audience can enter and leave the space at will through these curtains from any direction. Stepping inside the space triggers the interactive media, portraying a landscape that gets gradually bigger in scale as the participant’s breath accumulates over time. When the participant leaves, the landscape disappears, with the space going back to its empty state.

This spatial drawing enacted by the participant inside can also be perceived by an audience outside through a cut-out window structure, as if looking at a framed oriental ink painting. As the generated drawing is directly connected to the bodily experience of the person inside the space, the scene visible through the window might seem to symbolise a more distanced and objected view.

[‘uːm’ is the phonetic symbol for the core sound in words like ‘room’, ‘womb’, and ‘tomb’, which – in Korean thinking – all carry the breath of life.]

*Supported and sponsored by Asia Culture Center (ACC)

Acknowledgements:
Curation: Juhyun Cho
Data visualization: Sejun Hwang
Data transmission: Hyunchul Kim
Videography: Minhee Kang
Documentation: Jaeyoung Ahn

2021, Royal College of Art, London, UK
2021, Cromwell Place, London, UK

Programmed LED, realtime clock sensor, Arduino board, MDF, polycarbonate, neutral density filter, blown glass, levitating module

Work Process Documentation 🔗

Vanitas Vertigo Venus (2021) is an installation piece that invites viewers into an enclosed space denoting a disarrayed time-space of the distant planet, Venus, where a day is longer than a year, and the sun rises and sets twice a day. The LED window, framed in the shape of a Chinese character <日> meaning ‘day’ or ‘sun’, is programmed to unfold its own time-system in a room, which lightens and darkens through a depiction of virtual ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’.

In the centre of the room, a blown-glass ball hovers in the air on top of a pedestal, barely maintaining its own balance against gravity. Inspired by Pieter Claesz’s still-life painting (the artist depicts himself in the reflection on a glass orb), the brittle surface mirrors the silhouette of the audience standing amidst the moment-by-moment changes of disoriented time-scape in shifting light and darkness.

2021, Sejong Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea
2021, Ankara House, Seoul, South Korea

Real-time software program, interactive on touch-screen monitor or VR

The concept of a new time-scape within a room is translated into a digital format, allowing the audience to experience it in a virtual environment. The room stands alone in nowhere, situated in a virtual realm where the sun orbits around it, mirroring real-world time. While the sun casts direct light and shadow onto the room's exterior, the interior is illuminated by its own unique time system, achieved through a suggested light pattern on its window. Drawing a contrast of the time zone inside and outside the room, the project, when transferred into a digital cyberspace, conveys a self-portrait of myself encapsulated in a disorienting timescape.

2020

Real-time heart rate interactive performance Steel, 3D printed transparent clock hand, heart rate wireless sensor, servo motor, Arduino board

Work Process Documentation🔗

Now and Here (2020) is a real-time interactive performance piece carried out in a room where the framework of ‘time’ was driven by a private and truly personal form of data, my own heartrate. Like a metronome that internalizes a sense of timing for musicians, the clock in the room ticks with every heartbeat, never going forward but always only returning to the same spot. The clock’s hands point to each present moment. Changing absolute time to something personal and private, the clock replaces time with a performer.

Acknowledgments:
Videography: Min Soo Park

2021

Light, blinds

Cut-out Light (2021) was a site-specific work made in my empty studio at RCA. The work captured the idea of creating a cut-out of the immaterial light and juxtaposing shapes of where it falls in space along the passage of time.

2019, RCA Wip Show, London, UK

Piano wire, mirror, film, graphite on paper, steel, aluminium, epoxy resin, silk, needle

2017, Woods-Gerry Gallery, Providence, RI, USA
2019, Gallery Dos, Seoul, South Korea
2019, Sejong Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea
2019, Grimson Gallery, Seoul, South Korea
2024, Design House, Seoul, South Korea

mirror, Plexiglas, dimensions variable

The series Our Hours (Letters) (2019) explores the reflectivity of mirrors and the transparency of Plexiglas layered in an etched grid pattern. The mirrors, reflecting the light and color palettes of the space, create three-dimensional depth on the surface that reveals different grid patterns on each side. This series of works aims to portray the concept of an 'empty letter' that embodies messages subject to the receiver's interpretations and perceptions as well as to the surrounding space.

Acknowledgements:
Photography: Park Yoon

2018, Park Eul Bok Embroidery Museum, Seoul, South Korea
2018, Gallery MEME, Seoul, South Korea
2018, COSO Art District, Seoul, South Korea

Plexiglas, light box, (I) 55 x 55 x 30cm, (II) 25 x 25 x 85cm, (III) 85 x 85 x 17cm

Frigid in Mind (2018) captures the frozen motion and time of the moment when rain hits the surface. The sculpture wearing the colors of light explores the material’s malleability and transparency that depicts a fragile yet organic form.

2017, Woods-Gerry Gallery, Providence, RI, USA
2018, Gelman Gallery, Providence, RI, USA
2018, Seongnam Art Center, Seongnam, South Korea
2019, Grimson Gallery, Seoul, South Korea

Cotton, polyester, aluminium armature, 150 x 137 x 410cm

Murmuring in the Breeze (2017) is composed by the fabricated textile that consists of polyester warps hanging loose with burned out cotton fibres. The scale of the work invites the audience to an enclosed yet open stage where the air delicately breezes through.

Site-specific installation and performance at Ttangsok Space of Art, Seoul, Korea, 2018
Stainless steel scrubber, soft-wood timber, light bulb, motion sensor, speaker

Overview Effect (2018) was a theatrical installation and performance comprising the piece on the ground, which mimicked the texture of dazzling stars in the universe. The audience wandered about the vast installation and acknowledged the small chair sitting in the corner when the light switched on. The piece situated the audience in a state of calmly observing our existence from a distance, the reported feeling of astronauts observing the Earth from Space.

Site-specific installation at Fort Adams, New Port, RI, USA, 2016

Reflective yarn, monofilament, aluminium armature

12 Memoirs (2016), a site-specific installation made in one of the barracks at Fort Adams, is made of clear monofilament and reflective yarns, comprised of retroreflective glass beads that simply catch and reflect any available light around. Much like a spider’s web remains invisible until it’s under the light, the transparent yet light-reflective woven piece comes to life in darkness, engaging both the space and the audience’s perception. The installation alludes to the ghostly presence of 12 soldiers who once inhabited the site.