The 81st ARTCaffè hosted Hyunseon Kang in person in Seoul and via Zoom, with an audience connecting online from 7 different Countries.
Hyunseon started her presentation with Garden of Reason and Tracing Endeavour, two of her latest works developed around the idea of exploration and adventure. Here, she combined VR and AI for the first time with her multimedia practice: "Digital media, for me, offers this freedom of transformation. (...) I wanted to incorporate AI into the piece because I wanted to create a point of view that was not my own."

She then guided us backward in time, sharing the many sources of inspiration that she met along the way. She gave us insight on the reasons behind both the decision to create avatars and the incorporation of VR in her work: "More and more, I thought about how seriously we consider our 'identity.' I don’t believe it really exists, but we create it artificially, and we like to believe in it. In the digital world, our existing idea of identities seems very archaic and perhaps not relevant at all. (...) VR was the right medium for me to imagine this transformative perspective, looking at an uncategorizable world."

With the Apartment series, Hyunseon aimed to represent the role of apartments in Korean society today. “Apartments are in Korea a status symbol of a middle-class life and are investments as well. The titles I chose for each work, indicating a number, refer to the fact that neighbors often use the apartment number rather than their names to call or identify each other. Besides trying to capture this essence of the apartments, though, I also wanted to express that, as a person who lives here, they are a kind of my own mindscape.”

Hyunseon’s interest in Nature and plants, which we can find in her latest works, was also a source of inspiration for some of her earlier works, such as Vertical Garden (2016) and Concretopia (2017), both digital print installations. The first is her attempt to express what it means to be “Natural” today. The second was inspired by Kang Hee Ahn, an intellectual who wrote Short Notes on Growing Flowers, a book about gardening in 15th-century Korea that “contains basic information passed down from generations about a few dozen flowers and trees people have been enjoying growing as hobbies. It’s an instruction on how to grow and use the plants and explains the character of plants, their symbolism and their meaning. In this book, Kang explains the 와유 (wayu), which is the idea that when you are not allowed to visit nature because of daily life, you can still enjoy it by looking at your garden or painting. I think essentially it was their version of virtual reality to escape the burden of their daily lives. And I think my sensibilities are coming from this tradition.”

Then, Hyunseon described her piece Adventure of Lucy (2019): “This piece is a video game in which my avatar Lucy moves randomly, so we don’t actually know what’s going to happen. I think it expresses my love/hate relationship with the space of the apartment. Compared to the adventure stories of my recent works, the psychogeography of my life looks like a prison. Yet, I felt comfortable and safe in this space. Perhaps the humor or the irony is that I am having an adventure within the known, inside my home. And there is something eerie about my awareness of this fact.”

Hyunseon ended her talk with a description of some of her early works, pointing at the origin of her practice as a multimedia artist: "When I studied for my master's degree, I met a wonderful teacher named Alex Landrum, who told me that 'once you start with a new medium, there is no turning back.' He made me realize that I did not have to be confined by painting and that I could be free from the limits of the physical in this new medium. From then on, I gave up painting and immersed myself fully into the digital media."