An evening with Sung Hwan Kim

with Janine Armin, Gahee Park, Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, Linda van Deursen and Sung Hwan Kim

You are kindly invited to a trifecta of book launches related to the work of Sung Hwan Kim. The Honolulu-based artist is known for his film environments that he recalibrates for each locality, and which include film, sound, architectural intervention, and drawing. As in the artist’s work, the three books address displacement, rhythm, archives, protest—and the place of moving image and sound within this.

The evening is guided by a conversation with the artist and his book accomplices. Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, senior curator at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, begins with an introduction to the catalogue published on the occasion of Kim’s solo exhibition—which she organized at the Van Abbe and has travelled to ZKM | Center for Media and Art Karlsruhe—titled Protected by roof and right-hand muscles (2025). The book’s designer Linda Van Deursen will be on deck to discuss her engagement with hundreds of images from the artist’s immense oeuvre. Gahee Park, co-curator of the 16th Gwangju Biennale, will then introduce the exhibition she curated of the artist’s work at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) and its accompanying catalogue Ua a‘o ‘ia ‘o ia e ia (2025). Kim himself will read a newly translated excerpt from the SeMA book, and writer Janine Armin will share a passage from her One Work publication, Sung Hwan Kim: A Record of Drifting Across the Sea.

On this evening we look to orient ourselves around the minute shifts that occur over short timespans and long distances within a single artist’s practice. The celebration concentrates on the work Kim produced in Hawai’i, and its resonances across the sea to Korea. A collaboratively made poster is freely available with the books, alongside a presentation of texts from Native Books in Honolulu.