SEOUL.- Organized under the auspices of an annual exhibition series highlighting contemporary Korean artists at the Seoul Museum of Art, Ua a‘o ‘ia ‘o ia e ia, a solo exhibition by Sung Hwan Kim, invites viewers to become witnesses and producers of the very sites where “events of knowledge” occur, spread, and are manifested as praxis. At the center of the exhibition is A Record of Drifting Across the Sea, a multi-part research work the artist has been delving into since 2017. Beginning with the stories of early 20th century Korean immigrants to the United States who passed through “Hawai‘i,” A Record of Drifting Across the Sea expands these narratives to include issues of boundaries, tradition, documentation, and its possession and circulation, among others. In following these lives that exist outside more widely established narratives, the artist is taking a multivalent approach to addressing the issues that surround acts of knowing by taking stories from either side of various boundaries and weaving them together. By the same token, he also explores how systems of knowledge work to shape an individual’s thinking and gaze.

Here, “Hawai‘i” is both a concept and a specific geographic location. Even as Hawai‘i is a concrete place where lives and cultures drift across ethnic and regional boundaries, it is also a conceptual location in which we can examine the dynamics of the various forces in play all the way through to the present day. As a metaphor, Hawai‘i serves as the chosen site for the questioning of existing knowledge systems, intersecting them with different systems of knowing, and constructing entirely new structures of knowledge. This exhibition unpacks the ways in which the knowledge we call history is formed and disseminated, right alongside the traces that have long been relegated to the margins of such recorded history, proposing Hawai‘i as a lens through which we might consider the whole without sacrificing complexity.

Ua a‘o ‘ia ‘o ia e ia is an exhibition that hopes to capture the artist’s own experiences of witnessing and knowing in the wake of his relocation to Hawai‘i and transmit them as “events of knowledge” for the viewers. Like the artist himself, the exhibition approaches the subject matter as if unthreading the intricately tangled fabric of space-time along a multi-directional axis of knowledge. The exhibition unfolds across three rooms. Starting with migration narratives that unpack modern and colonial histories, we move on to the ways in which this object (history) has been handled, fleshing out questions around the formation, ownership, and distribution of the knowledge surrounding it as we progress from one room to the next.

Hawaiian philosopher and educator, “Aunty Manu” (Dr. Manulani Aluli Meyer) said that “the world is self-organizing, and because it is self-organizing, witnessing then becomes a higher frequency of knowledge exchange.” According to Aunty Manu, witness itself is an act of knowledge exchange. This exhibition, too, seeks to address issues of knowledge through this experience of active “witness.” Starting from the artist’s own questions and journey, the exhibition has itself undergone several transformations and edits as it made its way to you. And indeed, we plan for these processes of exchange and transformation to continue throughout the duration of the exhibition. Upon this fluid, floating ground, the artist’s journey and gaze will be followed by those of the curator, and this, in turn, followed by the viewers, creating a chain of witness upon witness within which we might find the opportunity to reflect upon what, exactly, is at work in our formulation of knowledge, and how we might approach it.

Curated by: Gahee Park, Curator with an assistance by Haewon Kim and Sung Hyun Cho, Exhibition Coordinators at Seoul Museum of Art