Kim Keedin

Under Construction

North Korean propaganda portraits are the only piece of art that are allowed to be hung in every household in North Korea. A picture to censor all pictures. Liquid metal is poured onto the surface of the print to distort and cover up the face like a veil. The state of censorship is a powerful subjective state in its self. It undermines the power of the viewer and the ideology that image represents.

Wall Hangings are in the collection of Daegu University.

Photographs, various sizes, 2014.

This ongoing series of color photographs appropriates famous black and white photographs originating from the Korean and Vietnam war. Liquid metal disrupts the viewers' power of the original image.

Sculpture, Human body size, 2015. Bamboo, motorcycle paint. In the collection of Onewwall Gallery in Seoul, Korea.

Absence is a google search engine logo made from bamboo sculptures, 죽부인, jukbuin. The shape of the sculpture functions a body pillow to hold at night. It was once common for sailors to use these sculptures at night for air conditioning and comfort during their colonial exploits. These have many names through out time:

Bamboo wife, Bamboo husband, Dutch wife, comfort woman, dead body, dead man, lover, father, mother, child, dream, nightmare, your friend in the hospital....

The neon sign blinks “jobs”, “jobs”, “jobs”, like in a store front window. The timing of the blinking is programmed to send out a message in Morse code. The neon’s design is formed into Steve Jobs' signature and broadcasts a simple python infinite loop that the audience can decode with a provide key:

while True:
    print ("tomorrow, and")

The code prints a fragment of Shakespeare's Macbeth “tomorrow” soliloquy repeatedly and will run on to infinity while the neon sign its self relies on the operation hours of the gallery. The looped words of Shakespeare activated through the signature of Steve Jobs interferes with viewer's investigation of the work's existential authorship. The concept of the finite and infinite emerge in the translation and transformation of the text, and undermines the artist's role as a sole creator and represents an array of artistic starting points thus revealing a subjective entanglement of meaning and signs.

paper & printer ink, 2015, Edition of 279

This is a series of paper sculptures made from the 279 page Dutch Safety Board report of the Mayalasian Airline MH17 Crash over Ukraine in 2014. When thrown, the paper airplane is designed to come back to thrower because of its dual dihedral wings. The information provided in the report thoroughly answers most questions about the crash except why did pro-russian forces launch missile at this airliner. The audience is invited to complete the work by throwing one of the 279 airplanes, thereby participating in contradicting representations, a plane that returns and plane that doesn't. Here is a link to the video of the report.

Edition in Bronze for 2016

Tilted, Gallium & Heated Floor, 2010- On Going

Tilted is a performance work that leaves a pool of liquid metal on a heated floor. The metal's low melting temperature prevents the pool from solidifying. This work represents the collective memory of a traumatic event and how the same event inhabits subjective spaces in our memory. It depends on how we experience or consume information about that event, effects how the event takes form within us: first hand eye witness, photographs, video, sound, and illustration.

First performance at White Box Portland, Oregon

I appropriated art magazine ads and installed a metal sculpture on top. By photographing the my sculpture and on top on the 2D space to merge my artistic identity with the identity of the multi-institutional art industry.

The black granite year dates mark the start and the end of American lives lost in the Vietnam war according to Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. These granite numerical text are the negative space recessed into the actual memorial wall in Washington DC. Then installed into dry wall mounted onto a timber frame and left unfinished, suggesting other lives lost in that war and explores representations in negative space and memory.

Photographs, 40″x60″, 2009. Edition of 7, signed and numbered.

In 2009 I accompanied Professor Sue Hartley to the Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst Place and took images of the filming of a short clip for the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. This greenhouse held the "celebrity" plants that had been grown from seeds that had been in storage in the cryogenic facility below ground. 

I hired a sharp shooter to shoot a hollow point bullet into another bullet. I imagine the gun and camera as technological metaphors for one another and thereby exploring the act of sculpture and photography in an instance of industrial and organic forms.

Photographs, 40″x 50″, 2009. Edition of 7, signed and numbered.

In August 2009 I visited a community of old growth activists who were living in tree houses in southern England near Titnore. I photographed their houses and capture the uniqueness of each habitat. For more on their activism and the outcome of the protest see their blog.

This work was selected for The Bigger picture/The Hub Exhibition in London 2009.

Carousel, 2015

Science Fiction, 3D Model Collage
Carousel is digital 3D model illustrating a science fiction art project. The setting is in the future where most of the original Earth life lives off solar system and Earth is zoned as low income housing to all beings. In effort to gentrify the forgotten planet developers have permitted use of Earth as an art gallery to attract investors. However nobody wanted to invest and demolition was too costly and Earth was left as a monument to itself.

The point view is an art historian reading an archived art review of the of that exhibition in a post-human Earth human existence. Earth is an art venue in sub value real estate waiting for gentrification.

This the art review of the

"Cartography Scans of Longing Landscapes: Political Visibilities Through the Historicity in Visual Information Technologies"

“I remember searching for an artist of Martian-Alpha Centaurtian ancestry. It was the last admitted review by the critic Musica Minehead in the quarterly publication, Lens End 2025. The review described structures of ruined landscapes point-cloud projected onto the surface of the Earth, an invisible monument, she calls a 'Page'. I recall the title, illuminated in my image-subtexts. Its shattering revelation appears to me in the raking light like pieces of porcelain on a blank white floor.

'Pages' (The Portrait of My Face is Revealed by this Side of the Moon)
Simone Kim-Zwick
6x6km Transparency, Satellites, Full Moon

Permanent Display
Courtesy of the Solar Cartography

The reviewer's intricate comments on the series were sourced from Kim-Zwick's notated explorations from within the island-sized film plane, she became closer to the data.

In her journal, she jotted down coordinates of a burning monk, fallen towers, student protests, political summits, emptied theaters, copulated actors, musical concerts, earthquakes, and long highways leading out of cities paved with automobiles. All of these images fabricated in the material of moonlight. 

Our images etched into grids, 

parallel by our shadows, 

joining the darkened curved facade below. 

Visitors became the part of Carousel, wandering permanently in their desires of humans' post-Earth archives." 

Photographs, 40″x60″, 2004. Edition of 7, signed and numbered.

This project was the culmination of a 6 month residency at the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics. 500 students, each with a disposable camera participated in this project, which was funded by Microsoft.

Photographs, 40″x60″, 2003. Edition of 7, signed and numbered.

Architectural interiors for sporting activities including climbing walls and squash courts, located in Seattle and Portland.