Kirsty Sim
About
Kirsty Sim (Korean:심훈) (born 02 November, 1990) is a South Korean artist. She lives and works in London and Seoul. Kirsty studied MA Photography at the Royal College of Art in London to further the research of humanities and relationships of existence that do not exist in real life. She has been working as a photographer with Fashion and Art Magazines and, last year, she was selected for the Bloomberg New Contemporary 2020.
Kirsty Sim’s work shows a constructive aspect of photography by manipulating reality and rebuilding facts. She uses art to actualise what she wants to see as it allows a space for fantasies to become their own reality
Statement
My practice is navigating the conflict between how to create, manipulate, and live in the world environment one is eager to live in, and how the impact and excitement of the separation of reality and imagination come into our lives. Furthermore, I am concerned with the generation of idol enthusiasts, how they might live, function, and engage with others, and how they engage with the gulf between reality and fantasy.
With the advent of the “information society”, I wonder whether easy access to information has led to the loss of a sense of direction, preventing members of our society from grasping what is truly important. I think, In this age of networks where boundaries have become blurred, we are shaped by social interactions and the physical environments we inhabit. Therefore, It is important to question our cultural environment to be able to understand change and find ourselves within it, which I resolve in my varied and diverse approaches to constructing art.
Bush Piccolo
For modern people living in the Internet age, identifying as a fan is becoming one of the dominant ways of consuming pop art. The image of the idol is disassembled by fans and is reborn by reassembling the disassembled pieces. This relationship, which exists somewhere between the object of desire and the subject, asks questions about the possibility of synchronising reality with non-realism. Fans’ love is still considered strange because it is difficult to substitute fan culture for the connection made by having a direct relationship with the other person. Nevertheless, it could be prejudicial and brutal to dismiss this affection as strange because the world has never heard of this love or seen it properly.
Medium: Archival pigment print
Digital Chemistry
I made physical prints with chemicals, scanned them, and manipulated the colours digitally, which I refer it to “processing with digital chemicals”. During the time of the pandemic, I sensed the gap between the social construct from the virtual world and the subsequently increasing desire for it to happen in the physical world. This led me to feel pointless about existing in a physical sense. The visualisation of such frustration in my work implies how the physical interactions and sensory are altered and limited online. At the same time, however, I discovered new ways of complex emotional and psychological interactions* that could be born from the limitations. In this work, I ask how the limitations could be viewed as a promise of possibilities for the future.
Medium: Archival pigment print
Size: 100x125cm
Another world is possible
“Another World is Possible” is a collaborative, self-organised exhibition by Protozoa. The format of the exhibition takes place on a clone site of the Royal College of Art’s digital body.
Medium: Online exhibition platform
In Collaboration with:
- Protozoa
Protozoa is a collective of artists from the Royal College of Art who met online during Peter Kennard and Gayle Chong Kwan’s generative workshop titled “Another World is Possible” in November 2020. This exhibition is the subsequent mutation of this collectivisation, which has now expanded outside of the body of the institution.