THE AESTHETICS OF BEING DISAPPEARED | WEDNESDAY KIM

The Aesthetics of Being Disappeared, video installation by Wednesday Kim, is a journey into the artist’s digital unconscious in which reflections, images and emotions are presented in a random and anarchic way. The video opens with the digital reproduction of the artist’s face, without hair or eyebrows, which rotates in an infinite circle with its mouth open and producing an annoying and disturbing noise. Where does this sound come from? Which organism produces it?

It is tangled

This is the answer we get from the series of subtitles that run one after the other to accompany the digital characters and environments that the artist has digitally recreated within the video work. And indeed everything seems inextricably tangled and complex. The images follow one another as in an out-of-control vortex: Wednesday Kim through these digital spaces transports us directly into her thought in which the links between emotions, considerations, reflections and analyzes are skipped and everything is presented in its being. The artist’s world is populated by humanoid creatures with missing limbs or organs, human-shaped daisies (perhaps the artist’s alter ego), strange fluorescent sewage and impossible tropical woods. however, here is an interruption: the google translate screen, reproduced by various devices, starts to function, one can almost imagine the artist typing the keys and composing the various sentences.

These sentences in Korean, being the artist originally from Korea, follow one another as they are composed and simultaneously translated by the software: our gaze tries to follow the logical thread of the sentences entered while the words are quickly canceled and replaced creating a flow of thoughts in constant transformation.

That… // Lack of confidence in social life // Confidence in social life… // Its familiarità //  Media… // the true nature of media // Compared to reality // because there are so many elements that require interaction

This stream of consciusness is interrupted by the face of the artist who returns declaring the root of the problem: can the virtual dimension convert awkwardness into confidence? Again the images collapse showing a schizophrenic succession of characters and words.

With this work, Wednesday Kim focuses on the difficulty of interacting between the real world and the virtual world: how much can the spaces we inhabit be considered dens or traps? What is the bridge to built between these two dimensions? But above all how to relate our psyche and our feelings in these contexts? The Aesthetics of Being Disappeared, in its frenzy but also heterogeneity of elements that are brought to the surface, is the perfect mirror of a common condition: the difficulty of finding an orientation and certainties in a world that has become a threshold, in which the the transition from a real dimension to a virtual one is now so immediate that the consequences are hardly perceived. The humanoid flower is now on a hospital bed and needs treatment, but what are these treatments? Wednesday Kim invites you to investigate digital in all its meanings.

Wednesday Kim
The Aesthetics of Being Disappeared, 2020
Multiple video installation, 2 channels
© courtesy the Artist

08/03/2023

Wednesday Kim, The aesthetics of being Disappeared, 2022 installation view, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore © Courtesy the artist