Sooun Kim is a multidisciplinary visual artist working through painting and moving image. He is interested in hybrid cultures that iterate from the effects of post-colonialism and cultural imperialism. His work, Yellow Fever (2019), marked the beginning of his auto ethnographic journey, where he collected his grandfather’s biography alongside records of historical figures to recover his personal cultural identity. Further interested in popular culture, he includes audio-visual reflections of his contemporary being as a South-Korean migrant where the past and present collide. Consciously unpredictable, Kim uses image and sound to play with viewer expectations by seducing and repulsing - genre bending to create an undefinable hybrid.
‘Metamorphic Rivulet’ is one of seven paintings in the ‘Ramifying Frost’ project, created using film and 3D modeling transferred onto canvas. Based around the medical term ‘heterotopic ossification’, where bone fragments form in soft tissues post-trauma, the imagery of Kim’s paintings manifests as faceted hybridity, fueled by his personal experiences as an immigrant to Scotland and by his cultural history: organic shapes melt with digital textures; limbs, organs and bones fuse with the landscape, just beyond perception. The body and the land become a seamless continuum, a fusion of tonalities that provide both the relief of revelation and the horror of awareness.