Heehyun Choi’s A Dark Room (2025) is a black-and-white 16mm and Super 8 to digital silent film that introduces the viewer to a female protagonist as she encounters the camera obscura, a phenomenon in which an image of the outside world is projected through a small hole in a darkened room. The work transports us back to the earliest moments of cinema’s formation, a provisional state of profound experimental potential that existed before the medium had been stabilized into a codified language of rules and narrative grammar.

In the past, camera obscura was employed by artists as a sketching aid ideal for rendering perspective. Upon experiencing it for the first time, Korean philosopher and poet Chông Yagyong (1762–1836) likened the projected image to a landscape painting in his essay Chil Shil Gwan Hwa Seol (On Viewing Paintings from the Dark Chamber). For Heehyun, textual references from this essay establish a Joseon context, alluding to a time when women’s daily lives were largely confined to interior domestic spaces. Within these enclosed spatial boundaries, however, women fostered the development of a rich tradition of creative practices, cultivating and transmitting unique forms of knowledge and technique. In many respects, our protagonist fills her darkened room with meaning as landscapes of empowerment unfold through the water she pours and across the blanket she is sewing. At the intersection of the mechanical and the poetic, Heehyun exudes a sense of renewed expansiveness that refuses to align with the spectacle of mass spectatorship. She floats an alternative historical imaginary; a form of cinema that may well have emerged within the rooms of Korean women a century ago.

A Dark Room epitomizes Heehyun’s desire to confront dominant cinematic language and conventions established by Hollywood and its global derivatives. It constitutes a bold intervention, subverting the structured expectations of narrative coherence, character identification, and explanatory clarity, all the while challenging assumptions embedded in the making and viewing of lens-based media, as well as society as a whole.

A Dark Room (2025)

Explore the Private Lives of Joseon-era Women was originally published in Vibes and Vistas on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Raised in Seoul, city boy Heechan Kim arrived in NYC after graduate school already fluent in density, seasonality, and a life shaped by walking and public space. The soil felt familiar, yet its energy was unmistakable. The city held many talents at once, and that dynamic coexistence generated a palpable intensity and pressure that soon became a source of Heechan’s creative momentum.

NYC is also unforgiving, its cost and pace demanding endurance while forcing difficult questions to the surface. Like many who choose to stay, Heechan has continued to question the kind of life and practice that can justify the struggle. Community has played a vital role in sharpening his sense of purpose. During his yearlong MONIRA residency at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, he worked alongside artists from diverse backgrounds, brought together by a shared commitment to process and material exploration. Recently, Heechan reunited spontaneously with former residency peers in a shared studio building, reinforcing how artist communities in and around NYC often evolve through return and persistence rather than dispersal.

His practice unfolds in deliberate contrast to the city’s speed. This deceleration carries an almost spiritual dimension, transforming the studio into a space of sustained attention rather than production alone. Working with wood, fiber, and metal, Heechan engages in slow processes such as bending, weaving, stitching, and joining. These repetitive, physical actions treat materials as collaborators that resist, remember, and respond. They also allow time to accumulate within the work, rendering his creative labor visible as a powerful record of care and urban resilience.

Heechan’s wood sculptures most clearly embody his experience of NYC. Built from small elements assembled into larger bodies, the works mirror how individual lives form collective structures. Their exteriors appear calm and resolved, while their interiors reveal compression, tension, and strain. Inside and outside remain fluid and interchangeable, a duality that reflects life in NYC itself, a city composed on the surface yet sustained by constant streams of effort beneath. Through these ambiguous, subtly-charged forms, Heechan considers the social fabric of human experience in a city that never sleeps, forever shaped through the forces of solidarity, friction, and interdependence.

Featured Work: #16 (2023). Ash wood and copper wire. 106.7 x 81.3 x 81.3 cm. Photograph Courtesy of The Loewe Foundation.

Heechan on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heechan_kim_art

Sculpting in the City That Never Sleeps was originally published in Vibes and Vistas on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sharon Chohi Kim’s creative practice centers around elemental forces and collective intelligence, incorporating a blend of acoustic and electronic sound, movement, and ritual to explore the interconnections between human beings and more-than-human actors. Through her performative works and experimental operatic projects, Sharon facilitates intimate, healing engagements with Mother Earth, all the while promoting essential themes of ecological listening, corporeal fluidity, and coexistence.

Co-produced by Living Earth, Nina Sarnelle, Black Cube Museum, and Spectra Studio, Paayme Paxaayt is an intentionally site-responsive and adaptive piece that expresses Sharon’s relationship with the Los Angeles River. She submerges metal instruments and a metal bowl filled with river water directly into the river, using hydrophones to amplify both the instruments and the water itself. Rather than control the sound, she allows the current to play the instruments, creating a shifting and unpredictable sonic field. In a deeply immersive fashion, viewers are invited to enter a state of flow and soften their spirits into the land.

Like a sculptural and ecological material, the vocalizations emerged through cycles of improvisation and embodied research, very much inspired by the majestic Great Blue Herons that frequent the area. The costume design also drew from avian motion and form, adding a distinct physicality to the piece.

Taking place at sunset, Paayme Paxaayt approaches the river as a living, breathing energy source, a collaborator, and a main protagonist. Employing the tenets of Korean shamanism and channeling fluctuations of light, wind, and water throughout, Sharon convinces us to relinquish egocentric impulses, deconstruct interpersonal boundaries, and once again reciprocate with local ecosystems and the living world.

Paayme Paxaayt (2025)

In Tune with the Los Angeles River was originally published in Vibes and Vistas on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fold (2025) harks back to a specific childhood memory; moments when Dohyun Baek’s parents would argue and his mother would leave the family home soon thereafter. Left alone in the kitchen, his father often grilled seaweed in a meditative fashion over an open flame. In solidarity, Dohyun joined him at the table for an impromptu kimbab-making session in what would manifest as a simple, honest fare, and a poignant offering of duty, care, and the residual pain of the night before.

This memory resurfaced during Dohyun’s exploration of male vulnerability. At its core, his Fold project drew upon a body of paintings in which the testicle took center stage; an overtly masculine feature that retains a nurturing softness in its capacity to carry potential progeny. During a landmark residency period, Dohyun probed the essence of the eponymous fold, from the act of doubling over and the gesture of two surfaces meeting, to the sense of sanctuary that echoed medieval paintings of the sheepfold as a place of care in the face of chaos and rupture. These experiments returned Dohyun to the kitchen, to the manner in which rice and seaweed paper held together precariously as if dwelling in the tension of the fold.

Having been privileged a unique stage in a church loft to work on, Dohyun moved to realize a performance using soy sauce as paint and his body as paintbrush. His practice questioned the fallacy of perfectionism and the subject of error, all the while exposing familial shortcomings at the intersection of conflict and affection.

He started with a series of dry performances, playing around with a variety of heavy, slow, and progressively faster movements while waiting for the soy to arrive and the Hanji paper to go up on stage. With little to no formal training as a performer, he relied upon the expertise of performance artist Sarah White, who so graciously supported him as he thought through the choreography as well as the layers of meaning contained within his movements and gestures.

The first performance took place with videographer Jim Mangles present. Irrespective of the preparation involved, it was impossible to predict the flow and spread of the soy as it blurred his vision, stung his face, and crept spontaneously into every crevice of his person. The live performance was a private affair, during which the soy seemed to fall differently upon freshly layered sheets of Hanji under the audience’s more intimate gaze. To finish, Dohyun exited the stage and sat at a small table with a bowl of rice and seasoned seaweed paper before handing out rice balls to spectators so they too could experience a taste of his childhood memory.

Audience members, friends included, have expressed feeling a certain discomfort and wonder during the performance as if bearing witness to, and even invading Dohyun’s sacred space. In those moments, they experienced Dohyun’s stage nerves vicariously, channeling his emergent blindness and raw vulnerability in what would become an essential part of the creative process.

Fold (2025)

Soy Sauce, Hanji, and Vulnerability was originally published in Vibes and Vistas on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Jinran Ha’s path began in Korea, where she studied design before spending time in London as an exchange student. The London vibe eventually led her to Berlin, where she enrolled at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK).

Jinran’s first encounters with the city were difficult to situate or process on demand. Experiencing moments of excitement and disorientation in equal measure, she recalls feeling as though the boundaries between her body and surroundings destabilized under the mandate of assimilation.

In a watershed moment, Jinran collaborated with the Koreanische Frauengruppe in Deutschland (KFD) on an exhibition held at Museum Quadrat Bottrop. Active since the 1970s, the KFD mobilized around labor and residency rights, restructuring aspects of German immigration policy through sustained political action. The exhibition involved extensive research and dialogue, culminating in close relationships with KFD members, including Kook-nam Cho-Ruwwe. On the final day, as the exhibition space was about to close its doors, all KFD members began singing their anthem unrehearsed. As voices filled the room, the collective’s sense of care and solidarity epitomized a means of existing across borders that challenged the need to assimilate and ultimately invigorated Jinran’s practice.

Giving the floor to ambiguity, Jinran now fluctuates between kinetic sculpture, performance, and digital systems. In doing so, she often approaches technologies such as generative AI and augmented reality from a critical standpoint, intent on disrupting, testing, and exposing their limits.

In Algorithmic Possession (2025), she focuses on the figure of Samsin Halmi, the Korean earth goddess of life, birth, and fate who is invoked in the KDF anthem. Having asked AI to generate an image of Samsin, Jinran faced the realities of a model trained primarily on Western-centric datasets. Rather than correct AI’s distorted, stereotypical outputs, she printed them, cut them into narrow strips, and installed them in an outdoor setting where they shifted in the wind. Algorithmic bias was accentuated and digital inconsistencies re-planted in physical experience, catching the reflections of viewers, questioning erasure in the name of optimization, and empowering bodies and stories excluded from the frame.

Featured Work:

Jinran on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jinran_ha

The Korean Earth Goddess Meets AI was originally published in Vibes and Vistas on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I like the craftsmanship that I get to experience in Oslo. I once took part in an exhibition called Bildungsroman (2023) at a time when I really wanted to make something ‘ugly,’ with all the creepy bodies that are on the verge of being figurative; barely figurative, barely functioning, and representing the status of growing sideways. The installation layout was devised accordingly, with the inflatable structures devoid of solid supports except for reclining metal frames, and a lot of intentional, surplus sculptures laid out and hung all over the place. I wanted to ‘fail’ the space completely, but for that very reason, it became my least favorite exhibition of the period. I still have conflicting feelings about it, wondering how to embrace that strange feeling, and what to do in case that sort of urge comes up again.

I hope my work can serve as a portal to question familiar knowledge which may lead us to focus more on the margins and peripheries of society. I often reflect on the factors that shape an individual’s tendency to survive rather than live, and I am surprised by how survival is so ugly yet invisible. This work is a question to myself, not some delivery of perfect messages. I want to keep questioning the ugly nature of humanity and how to prepare a place for the lost.

I sometimes think that I do the work of a clown, by making rip-offs and spin-offs of familiarity with objects that are dislocated and derailed from utility. Other times, I think that I do the work of a mortician, preparing the most brutal and hideous scenes that follow violent events, looking at them closely, and bringing them into a new context of the sublime.

Full Interview:

https://vibesnvistas.com/an-interview-with-hankyul-kim

2. Alexandra Mitiku | @alexandra.mitiku

Growing up there was a lot of movement between houses and countries. Arriving in Helsinki happened in my late twenties after a long period of indecision.

The most memorable moment would be seeing my first painting being exhibited in Kiasma, and the plaque next to it. I started my career with my middle name, Kihwa-Endale, in the hope that one day my parents’ names (Kihwa Park and Endale Mitiku) would be seen somewhere prestigious. Being able to fulfill this felt like a professional and personal milestone. Now I go with my own name, and I suppose there is something symbolic in this. In particular the timing of it, since I am currently forming my own relationship to Korea and Ethiopia, and my work is informed by my Korean and Ethiopian roots.

I have become aware that the tools I use for integration and reconnection have many similarities. In both, there is a transition from who you are (or could have been) and what you are becoming. To quote a line from Elif Shafak’s Three Daughters of Eve, “There is no wisdom without love. no love without freedom. and no freedom unless we dare to walk away from what we have become.”

The thought of me or my work representing a country makes me a bit hesitant, because my perspective comes from a third space, like a paradise, where borders are custom made.

Full Interview:

https://vibesnvistas.com/an-interview-with-alexandra-mitiku

3. Sojin Park | @sojin_assembledhalf

I arrived in Berlin on a winter’s night, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that German winters are terribly harsh. From then on, finding a sense of home became my mission.

Having lived here for such a long time, I wondered if I was merely circling back to the starting point, moving from the outside in and back again. My desire for stability felt shipwrecked, and I experienced a ghost-like existence as if forever crossing boundaries and standing between worlds adrift.

Most people live life in a narrow way, like cogs performing their assigned roles. They are driven by painful demands to relate to the place they live and belong to it. Such an unfulfillable demand makes them rely on excessive ideology or religion, or be forgotten, namelessly entangled in their relationship with society. It becomes an eternal source of suffering.

To step beyond the limits of their lives and think and look anew, they must first tear through the gaps. These gaps are often discovered by mixed beings; those who float, mingle, and cross between worlds. Though they protrude through the gaps in states of deformity, they play a key role in creating rifts and putting the dilemmas of our time on view. These are fragmenting monsters, phantoms neither male nor female, mixers, wanderers, and prophets. They are the ones I depict in a transformed and intermingled form.

Full Interview:

https://vibesnvistas.com/an-interview-with-sojin-park

3 Korean Artists to Watch Right Now Part II was originally published in Vibes and Vistas on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I saw the roughest parts of Philadelphia before anything else, yet they fascinated me. Everything felt brutally honest. While it didn’t hide its grime, chaos, and despair, its resilience and pride shone through. Philadelphia had this “I do what I want, deal with it energy” that seeped into my practice over the years. The city taught me to be loud, confident, and unapologetic; how to be tough in a kind, loving way. It taught me fear, but it also taught me to be brave.

There is the term Samramansang, meaning “all things in the universe.” Philadelphia feels like that…like everything. When I was little, my neighborhood held an art contest for kids where we had to make what alien food would look like. I threw a bunch of random crap inside a ball of clay and mashed it together. I remember all the moms falling silent in front of it. Their reaction was not malicious, my work simply looked like a goblin had made it. Philadelphia feels that way sometimes. It feels like an art school cabinet where the world has hoarded all its unexpectedness and craziness, and I am free to use everything and anything in it.

My biggest source of inspiration has always been Korean Pungsokhwa folk paintings. I love how the genre shows affection towards the powerless. Living abroad comes with moments that make you feel small. At some point, you get enough green card jokes thrown at you, and you want to be mad, but you are still so small. But that smallness made me pay closer attention to beings and moments that get overlooked. That is where Koreanness lives in my work: in the instinct to hold space for what’s vulnerable and insist that it matters.

Full Interview:

https://vibesnvistas.com/an-interview-with-kay-seohyung-lee

2. Jun Yang | @junyarts

Growing up in Korea, I never felt like I truly belonged, especially in school. I was bullied a lot. I was always searching for a place where I could feel safe and didn’t have to be afraid to express who I really am. In San Francisco, I saw many immigrants and queer people from all over the world. I loved it so much, I could smell the freedom. I still remember walking through fog-covered hills, seeing murals blooming on old walls in the Mission District, hearing people speaking in dozens of languages, and seeing gay people living openly and proudly. I thought this is a place where I could start over, let go of old versions of myself. Living here, I’ve come to see art not just as a personal expression, but as a gesture of care. A way to build community. A way to create sanctuary for people like me and for those who haven’t always felt seen or safe.

Being away from Korea has made me more aware of how deeply that part of me still lives in my work, guiding me every time I pick up the brush. These roots show up in the way I begin with childhood memory. In Korea, I took traditional painting (Soo Muk Hwa) classes, starting in kindergarten and continuing through elementary school. That early exposure shaped how I see and move through the world. I remember sitting with my mom and she shared her favorite colors and animals, especially birds, trees, and flowers. Each image had a story: the crane for longevity, the pine trees for endurance, the peony for honor and beauty. Those symbols stayed with me. We didn’t have oil paint and canvas, so we used rice paper or Hanji, and I’ve carried that tradition with me. It connects me to home and I love how the ink moves on it and it blurs and bleeds with water, how soft and alive it feels. There’s something pure and honest about it. Paper can be fragile, but it holds so much weight. That foundation is always there; in the curved black lines, the shapes of bodies, the balance between boldness and softness. It just lives in my hands.

San Francisco will always be my second home. My chosen family is here. This is where I found my voice, my community, and the courage to be who I am. My dream is to build stronger bridges between here and Korea, to share my stories across borders. San Francisco gave me space to breathe and become. I hope I can help, support and offer that same space to others, wherever I go.

Full Interview:

https://vibesnvistas.com/an-interview-with-jun-yang

3. Yong Sun Gullach | @yongsungullach

Being a child in Denmark in the 70s, I took part in an almost naïve time of positivity. Being young in the 80s formed my idea of creativity, allowing me to experiment and question the norm. I moved to Copenhagen and stayed there with breaks, living for a couple of years in NYC as well as shorter stays in other European capitals. During the 90s, I witnessed Copenhagen developing into a more international capital with the exchange of foreign artists and students. In the 2000s, I reconnected with Korea which would become a lifelong complex relationship I still try to grasp and feel a part of to this day. In the latter years, I have experienced a Denmark marked by a political influence I fear will divide the country and increase xenophobia and conservative values. The space for challenging the existing structures has decreased but I feel it makes the work of artists that much more important.

I work at the moment with two other artists in a collective called The Clinic, where we develop a practice about mental health and how it impacts an artist’s body. I want to create an art space and practice where people with alternative needs, pasts and priorities can create and be recognized equally by those of us who experience less challenges. I am also sewing a Danish folklore dress made from three old hanboks I have gotten from Korea. There is a deep part of me that wants to connect the part of Korea I possess to Danish history. An attempt to hack the Danish and Korean national history to contain me, and the way Korea chose to make me Danish. The dress will be used in a new live performance at Ikast Kunsthal in August, 2026.

I am on a never-ending hunt to reclaim my Korean heritage that was taken from me at an early age. But I cannot escape the feeling of never owning it or having the right to access, so I feel every sign and artefact from Korea is a simulacrum, an overexposure from my side in order to play with signs I really cannot access. It creates a deep sorrow within me. Yet, I still insist on trying, believing my art is the purest platform, where I can incorporate everything lost. Here, I can bend reality to fit my aesthetics and here I can demand for things to make sense.

Full Interview:

https://vibesnvistas.com/an-interview-with-yong-sun-gullach

3 Korean Artists to Watch Right Now was originally published in Vibes and Vistas on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Go where Suah Im’s Bear Woman goes.

Having spent over a decade in Germany, most of it in Stuttgart, Suah Im’s move to Berlin marked an introspective return to unfamiliarity. Despite her years abroad, she found herself once again contending with the sensation of being a stranger in a foreign land.

Eventually, artists and curators reached out, initiating conversations that opened space for new relationships to gel. Significant others supported her as she reoriented herself amidst displacement, igniting a process of negotiation that remains central to her transnational practice.

Working primarily through installation while incorporating drawing, video, performance, and kinetic objects, Suah subverts fixed categorizations. Each medium functions as a greater whole, at times standing alone while also merging into more immersive terrains. What remains constant is the role of drawing, through which subconscious impulses surface and intersect with conscious reflection, allowing Suah’s ideas to interact before taking on material form.

Traversing cultures has impacted Suah’s sense of identity, with the question of Ich (I) arising as a transient construct shaped by context, language, and lived experience. This inquiry is further enriched by her engagement with Korean mythology alongside Taoist and Buddhist thought.

Within this spiritual landscape, the figure of the bear takes on particular significance. In Berlin, the bear is a familiar emblem, embedded in the city’s character. In Korean tradition, it also appears as a foundational figure, most notably in the story of Ung-nyeo, or the bear-woman. This duality is explored in Bear Woman on Third Planet (2023), a video installation that combines analog drawings, studio footage, filmed scenes from Tierpark in Berlin, and additional performative elements. Here, the figure of the bear-woman roams the gaps between home and away, human and animal, care and violence, never once retreating into a palattable single origin. A related scenario matures in Disappeared Bear Woman Schnah (2023), set within the Bärenzwinger, a former site of animal confinement now repurposed for artistic production.

Suah’s exhibitions in Berlin, including her presentations at EIGEN+ART Lab and SOMA Berlin, have provided yet more opportunities to test broader questions of movement and change. Her current participation in the Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt continues this trajectory, offering the practical and interpersonal resources needed to share the realities of inhabiting multiple selves, and liberate the tensions between belonging and estrangement that continue to define her life.

For more content like this, as well as open access to the magazine archive, visit the Vibes and Vistas website.

See more of Suah Im’s artworks: https://vibesnvistas.com/stranger-again

The Art of Becoming a Stranger was originally published in Vibes and Vistas on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Wander through Helena Parada Kim’s migrating gardens.

Born in Cologne and raised in the Rhineland, Helena Parada Kim went on to study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Peter Doig, where exchanges across borders were encouraged and local encounters with fellow artists played out spontaneously in the streets. After graduating, she relocated to Berlin in search of new possibilities, embracing the city’s scale and building new connections with great perseverance.

Since then, Helena has participated in a select few Berlin-based exhibitions, with many of her larger shows taking place further afield. Nevertheless, Berlin has provided a set of unique conditions integral to her practice. Of particular note is her studio in Oberschöneweide, a former center of electrical industry that has shifted from production to abandonment and, more recently, cultural and creative resurgence. Within a large, listed building, she has found a balanced space that accommodates introspection and the physical demands of painting. The adjoining garden, where she cultivates plants that later appear as motifs in her works, extends this environment meaningfully beyond the studio walls.

In her oil on canvas botanical studies, Helena paints plant life with careful attention to light and surface, capturing gentle variations in texture and color. In many respects, the natural sanctuary on her doorstep has grounded her practice in growth, seasonality, and ultimately the passage of time.

Her work is further anchored in a consistent set of concerns pertaining to migration, collective memory, and transmission. This is evident in her Hanbok series, garments brought to Germany decades earlier by women of her mother’s generation. Similarly, her still life works draw upon the Korean ritual of jesa, reinforcing the continuity and persistence of cultural ties over time. Here, arrangements of food function as atmospheric compositions, breaking free from the visible realm to meditate upon the forces of mortality and remembrance across borders.

Helena’s father, originally from Spain, had once lived as a monk before settling in Germany, while her mother arrived from Korea in the 1960s as part of the guest worker generation. Her time in Berlin epitomizes a desire to connect with these roots, highlighting how intergenerational histories, intersecting cultures, and inherited traditions continue to influence that which is seen in the present, as well as the myriad of hybrid identities yet to come.

For more content like this, as well as open access to the magazine archive, visit the Vibes and Vistas website.

See more of Helena Parada Kim’s artworks: https://vibesnvistas.com/taking-root

A Garden Between Korea, Spain, and Germany was originally published in Vibes and Vistas on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.