Soo Kim

Balloon Project

There are many social issues worldwide, and out of them, I came up with the mundane and worldwide issues: climate change and sustainability as solutions. It seems ordinary, but we live every day with efforts, yet the problem is still an issue. Not only in my place, in many house people collects and pile them for recycling use in the future. However, we still could not stop using plastic with the massive industry and its production relating to our consuming society. For the utopian and dystopian project, I plan to build a single giant plastic bag as a figurative sculpture filled in a whole space using collected plastic from neighbors and myself. This overwhelming floating form in a single area metaphorically pushes people to recycle as part of an illusion.

Artist Statement

With my engaging sculptures, I explore interactivity and provoke joyful reactions from viewers. Part of the way is to make my theories more relative and universal to the public with the pursuit of building physical interactions with the performative objects, and people learn something new from them. I believe in making those interactions creates unexpectation, meaning the nature of the reaction, which always surprises me and brings me to a complex new perception of the world.

I have been working with soft and flexible materials for mold-making and casting, such as silicones, cardboard, and wood. The materiality informs the artworks by its flexibility and playfulness given to the public. My multiple replications and the sustainability of objects strengthen material consideration. I often got inspiration from Hannah Levy, an emerging sculptor who uses a lot of flexible materials, transforming into a form capturing movement. My belief in math always makes the best measurements in mold making and sometimes leads to the experiment as unexpectation. One of the projects I did called “Failure” visuals multiple replication hammers that communicate my thought on failure; people sometimes try things knowing that they will fail but just do it for gaining experience. I let people touch the hammer made out of silicon and ask to target the nail in the middle to experience the failure with its functionlessness. The piece fundamentally has two contradictory emotions, the unfunctionally of context on failure and the functionality as enjoyable objects.

From the observation of the unexpected interactivity, a collaboration between the public and artworks, I have kept developing new ideas for the next upcoming projects. One of the recent proposals is a creation of an engaging object that people can eat out of it, which conveys a new way of eating practice based on my nomadic cultural background with ritual table manners I learned in the past.

Artist Bio

Soo Kim was born in South Korea and is an interactive sculptor who makes a lot of performative objects. She began her studies in arts at Idyllwild Arts Academy in California, where she experienced a diverse cultural community and diversity in the arts and was inspired by the natural environment. She currently studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for a Bachelor of Fine Art. Her work addresses some exploration of interaction and reaction to make a joyful environment for both artists and audiences. Part of the way is to make her personal thoughts more relative and universal to the public with the pursuit of building physical interactions. Her material choice, commonly soft flexible materials for mold-making and casting, such as silicones, cardboard, and wood, inform the work by its flexibility and playfulness given to the audience. She is interested in world nature, not just the biological of it, more about the unexpectation. Along with the subjectiveness, she believes in making those interactions better understand the artworks.

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