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Sung Hwan Kim: A Record of Drifting Across the Sea

by Janine Armin

Migration, memory, and an artwork still in motion

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AlbakiReads Editorial

Migration, memory, and an artwork still in motion

Janine Armin examines Sung Hwan Kim’s ongoing film and installation series, *A Record of Drifting Across the Sea*, through its treatment of undocumented Korean migrants who travelled to the United States via Hawai‘i around the turn of the twentieth century. Archival traces and bodily memory meet folklore and myth, as the work considers how migration histories resonate across migrant and Indigenous communities. Its two existing chapters, with a third in progress, make the project an open-ended, collaborative inquiry rather than a single, closed object. Armin’s account also attends to translation, displacement, belonging, and forms of relation that resist being reduced to representation.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in contemporary art and artist-centered books.
  • Readers exploring Korean migration history, displacement, and belonging.
  • Readers interested in film and installation as ongoing, collaborative projects.

Themes

Migration and diasporaArchival memory and embodied historyDisplacement and belongingTranslation and representationCollaboration and non-sovereign ways of being together

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

A richly illustrated exploration of Sung Hwan Kim's complex record of migrant stories, displacement and belonging, border-crossings and translation.

In A Record of Drifting Across the Sea (2017-), Sung Hwan Kim turns to past histories of migration. The artist parses the traces--archival and bodily--left by undocumented Korean migrants who came to the US by way of Hawai'i at the turn of the last century, and ponders over their impact on other migrant and indigenous communities. As an ongoing film and installation series, comprising two chapters and a third in progress, A Record unsettles the limits of the "one work" with its distributive, open-ended and collaborative nature.

In this speculative inquiry, Janine Armin explores each chapter in Kim's multilayered work as a mycelial network of feelers entangling and extending the wider work in process. Engaging history through the senses, folklore and myth, as much as through archival material, Kim navigates and crosses the boundaries between displacement and belonging. Focusing on the artist's attempt to escape from representation, Armin illuminates and attends to the different stories and non-sovereign ways of being together towards which his work points us.

This title is part of the One Work book series, which focuses on artworks that have significantly changed the way we understand art and its history.
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