Digital Season, Merging Redthread Landscape
by June Kim
Date: 2024
Dimensions: 50 x 90 cm
Medium: AI
Number of editions: 3 editions
Price: 1,000€
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Artwork Purpose
Press any key to unlock the realm of the coming new era. Digital Season, Merging Redthread Landscape is a still image from the animation Press Any Key To Unlock. This animated work was produced as part of a commission for the Screen Saver exhibition in Tokyo organized by the collector Unknow Collector in March 2024. The title echoes the infamous dispute between art critic Jerry Salz and artist Refik Anadol.
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Relations between artists and art critics have often been explosive, and the tradition of this misunderstanding goes back a long way: Edouard Manet was mocked, the Impressionists humiliated... More recently, another quarrel erupted on the X platform (ex Twitter) between artist Refik Anadol and critic Jerry Saltz, over the Unsupervised-Machine Hallucinations-MoMA work, created in 2022 by Anadol and powered by artificial intelligence, which was exhibited on the first floor of MoMA for a year, a period that ended on October 29, 2023. The quarrel began in February 2023, when Saltz first examined Unsupervised, then acquired by the museum to add to its permanent collection. In his review, he begins on a positive note, calling the work a “runaway success”, but later expresses his disagreement, calling curator Michelle Kuo “responsible for this pointless museum mediocrity”. He goes on to list the work's shortcomings. He uses adjectives such as “derivative and familiar”, “mildly entertaining” and “a half-million-dollar screen saver”. As a critic, Saltz had every right to express his opinion of Anadol's work, but the comments kept coming. Earlier this month, he continued his attack on Anadol on X, calling the work a “mind-numbing multi-million dollar spectacle” and a “house of cards”. The debate flared up, Anadol responded, and Salz struck the final blow, calling Anadol's work a mere “Screen Saver”, which earned him the wrath of the digital art community.
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June Kim comes to the artist's defense in this creation, taking offense at Jerry Salz's characterization of Refik Anadol's work as a mere “Screen Saver”, royally ignoring the artist's entry into MOMA's permanent collection. The Korean artist, known for her installations and sculptures inspired by the concept of the red thread, is proud to say that she is now taking part in the historic invasion of digital art. A few years ago, this renowned visual artist didn't hesitate to appropriate the new tools of artificial intelligence, seeing in digital art and these new technologies a means of continuing to convey the philosophy of her art in new forms. In this work, the artist takes pleasure in mixing the red thread, symbolizing the ties that bind humanity, with the typical landscape of a screensaver, thus addressing the links between Humans and digital nature through the prism of new artificial intelligence processes. June Kim is currently running a major training program on new artificial intelligence processes at a number of universities in South Korea, to raise students' awareness of the concept of “prompt philosophy.”
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Adress
You can discover the artworks in Paris or Versailles by appointment (write me).
Terms of delivery
Metropolitan France: 1 week
European Union: 2 weeks
Rest of the world: 2-4 weeks
Contact
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Biography
June Kim (born in 1987 in South Korea) is an artist who creates phygital installations made of red thread, from her data on social networks. The artist studied photography at the University of Bukyong (Busan), then left for the United States of America to join the Art College of Design in Pasadena, California, where she obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Artsarts. In 2010, she began her professional career by joining the team of a prestigious production studio in Los Angeles. June Kim is evolving with technology and developing a positive vision of digital and its growing impact on our contemporary societies.
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In parallel, June Kim develops her career as a visual artist. Her artistic work articulates a contemporary reflection around an ancient Asian belief: “An invisible red thread connects at birth those who are destined to meet.” The two people connected by the red wire are lovers destined to be together, regardless of the place, time or circumstances. In Europe, we could compare this concept to the idea of “soul mate”, although this thread can also connect a person to his/her mother, father, brother, friend, So they can discover and love each other. If the red thread and the Asian belief behind this motif are recurring in the work of many artists like Chiharu Shiota or David ÄŒerný, June KIM’s works bring a new dimension to these concepts. For the artist, the theory of the red thread - an Asian poetic equivalent of the concept of Destiny - is no longer a mere belief, but is anchored in a tangible reality: Humans invented Fate, these invisible red threads today exist indeed, they are our algorithms.
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Following a long period of overwork, June Kim feels the need to reconnect with her cultural roots and the natural environment around her. The artist makes the decision to leave the big production studios in Los Angeles to set up her own agency, on a human scale, thus benefiting from a more serene work rhythm. The question of her connection to nature gradually became a prominent subject in her personal and then artistic reflection over the last four years. The development of recent tools using artificial intelligence processes allows her to incorporate a new dimension in her work, pushing her to explore the possibilities of intangible art.
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Her still images and digital animations explore ways of reconnecting humans with Nature, through the creation of imaginary landscapes rooted in reality, traversed on either side by abstract red threads. This new facet of her work explores the question of human filiation to Nature, where the red thread becomes an umbilical cord to which every human being is attached.
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If June Kim feel in the new artificial intelligence processes a new tool for artists, she warned on the need to succeed in transmitting to these software its own philosophy of creation, its artistic touch, which she groups under the concept of “prompt philosophy”.
Her work has been awarded multiple times (SeeMe Global Competition, Scope Art Show Art Basel 2012, California Open Exhibition 2013, finalist Apple Vision Pro...). June Kim took part to numerous art exhibitions in California (Main Museum, San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, BG Gallery, H Gallery, Irvine Fine Arts Center…). From 2019, her work is exhibited in many international exhibitions or fairs (Gallery Space776 in New York, Gallery 508 in Londres, Stratosphere NFT in Pékin, Maison des Associés in Toulouse, galerie Iham in Paris, Gallery XR in Séoul, Los Angeles Art Show 2019, 2021 and 2022, Bitcoin 2021, NFT NYC 2021, BWB 2022, Art Basel Miami 2022, NFT Paris 2024...).
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Text written by Annelise Stern - copyright Art Girls