Artist Kim Hongrok
Kim Hongrok is a Korean contemporary artist who began with painting on canvas and expanded his practice into performance, photography, film, and installation.
Born in 1985, he graduated from Whimoon High School and entered the Department of Painting at Hongik University’s College of Fine Arts in 2005, where he majored in painting.
While at university, he established a private studio and continued working both within and beyond the school. Through exchanges with photographers, filmmakers, models, actors, and people working in other fields, he encountered a range of working methods and perspectives. The fact that the same event could be interpreted differently according to the observer’s position and experience naturally became a focus of his practice.
Between Fact and Perception
After completing his military service and returning to university, Kim Hongrok began his activity as an artist in 2008, while still a student, by developing works under the shared title A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity. Rather than foregrounding the artist’s emotions or conclusions, he presented the situations in which people, events, and actions were placed, leaving room for viewers to begin thinking for themselves.
Here, “objective expression” does not mean that the artist’s perspective or the work’s value orientation disappears. The artist’s judgment necessarily enters into the selection of a subject and the construction of a situation. The objectivity Kim Hongrok pursued was closer to an attitude of reducing emotional staging and direct explanation so that the subject and situation could appear before the viewer first.
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Brushing Teeth
Begun in 2008, A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Brushing Teeth is a series of performance and photographic works that places an everyday action repeated by many people among different individuals and in different locations.
Brushing one’s teeth is ordinarily an act of hygiene performed in a private space. The artist moved this action in front of an artwork, into a studio during a nude drawing class, and into a cinema. The significance of the work, however, goes beyond showing a familiar action in unfamiliar places. Brushing teeth functions as an act that invites viewers to reconsider, within a single scene, the relationships between artist and artwork, student and creative agent, and art and industry.
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Jongsik Choi
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Jongsik Choi / Lambda print, 2008, Kim Hongrok
Two people brush their teeth in front of an artwork by Jongsik Choi. Rather than depicting people viewing an artwork, the work places an everyday physical action performed by Choi in front of his own work within the same frame as the artwork. In doing so, it invites viewers to reconsider the relationship formed between the person who made a work and the work itself.
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Nude Drawing Class
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Nude Drawing Class / Lambda print, 2008, Kim Hongrok
This performance took place during a nude drawing class. Within a class devoted to observing and drawing the human body, the artist independently chose the act of brushing his teeth and transformed it into a work.
The positions of a student taking a class and an artist making a work overlap in a single scene, revealing an identity as a creative agent who initiates and carries out work through his own judgment before being defined by his status as a student. Rather than limiting the student to a provisional being who has not yet become an artist, the work presents him as an artist capable of creating and performing work within the educational process.
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Megabox
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Megabox / Lambda print, 2008, Kim Hongrok
Several people stand together and brush their teeth at COEX Megabox. In addition to those assembled for the shoot, passersby in the surrounding area were invited to participate, and some joined on the spot, brushing their teeth as part of the work’s production.
A cinema is a place where the art of film meets its audience through the industrial system of production, distribution, and exhibition. Visual art likewise meets society within structures of creation and exhibition, circulation and exchange.
This work places within a single frame the common ground shared by film and visual art: both are forms of artistic expression that exist under commercial conditions. It invites viewers to reconsider the differing perceptions and attitudes through which the industrial nature of film is readily accepted while visual art is regarded solely as a pure realm separate from the market.
Across these three works, brushing teeth does more than move an everyday action into an unfamiliar setting. It functions as an act that prompts viewers to reconsider the relationships and distinctions between an artist and the artist’s own work, a student and a creative agent, and art and industry.
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Seok-cheon Hong
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Seok-cheon Hong
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Seok-cheon Hong / Lambda print, 2011, 120 × 120 cm, Kim Hongrok
After Seok-cheon Hong came out publicly in 2000, he was removed in succession from the television programs on which he had appeared. Over a considerable period, social attitudes gradually changed, and Hong returned to broadcasting and resumed an active career. Kim Hongrok made this work with him in 2011, while those changes were continuing.
Rather than judging how an individual changed over time, the work asks viewers to consider how society’s and the media’s ways of looking at the same person had changed. It does not define the person’s identity through a single explanation, but takes the changing perceptions surrounding him as its subject.
An Expanded Range of Media Rooted in Painting
Oil on canvas, 120 × 120 cm, 2010, Kim Hongrok
Kim Hongrok continued to paint even as he expanded his range of expression into photography, performance, and installation. Rather than abandoning painting and moving to other media, he has selected a medium according to the subject and method of each work.
Egg tempera on a wooden board, 2004, from the portfolio submitted for admission to Hongik University, Kim Hongrok
Oil on canvas, 2007, Self-portrait, Kim Hongrok
The 2004 egg tempera work, the 2007 self-portrait, and the 2010 oil painting show that Kim Hongrok’s practice began with painting. The photography, performance, film, and installation that followed can be understood not as a break from painting, but as a process through which his methods of expression expanded.
First Solo Exhibition
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Bussot, Raul
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Bussot, Raul / Installation, performance, film, photography and text / Five-day performance / Gallery open 24 hours during the performance, 2013, Kim Hongrok
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Bussot, Raul was Kim Hongrok’s first solo exhibition and addressed the experience of the Bussot family, who crossed from Cuba toward the United States on a raft in 1993. Corresponding to the dates of the family’s voyage and rescue, from March 25 to 30, 1993, the exhibition was held exactly twenty years later, from March 25 to 31, 2013.
Raul Bussot Jr. was five years old in 1993. According to the family’s recollections, Raul’s father and two companions prepared a raft in a mangrove forest, avoiding surveillance by the Cuban Coast Guard, and set out to sea at night.
Raul Bussot Jr. remembered the family leaning against one another for warmth in the cold sea and his expectation that, in the United States, he would be able to watch cartoons on television without power outages. Blown off course by a storm during the voyage, the family drifted for five days before being rescued with the aid of the United States Coast Guard.
Kim Hongrok met Raul Bussot Jr. and interviewed him about his family’s experience. In 2013, twenty years later, the artist made an aluminum raft of the same form and dimensions, based on the original raft, and installed it inside the gallery.
The artist and the now-adult Raul Bussot Jr. ate, slept, and lived on the raft for five days. Drawing on the provisions the family had prepared at the time, they used Spam, chocolate, and water in the performance. The gallery remained open twenty-four hours a day throughout the performance.
In this work, viewers did not remain outside, simply observing a completed result. They approached the setting in which the artist and Raul Bussot Jr. were living, listened to their story, and spoke with them; these encounters also became part of the performance.
Footage recorded by the United States Coast Guard / Florida, USA / 6 minutes 50 seconds / 1993
Footage documenting the 1993 voyage and rescue was also presented in the gallery. By placing the historical record and the performance staged twenty years later in the same space, the exhibition enabled viewers to consider the relationship among lived experience, memory, and re-enactment.
The exhibition drew a correspondence between the adversarial and severed relationship of the liberal United States and socialist Cuba and the relationship between liberal South Korea and socialist North Korea. It overlaid within the work the shared structure of political systems in which liberalism and socialism confronted one another.
Exactly twenty years later, in 2013, the artist brought the Bussot family’s 1993 departure from socialist Cuba toward the liberal United States into an exhibition space in South Korea. As the relationship between the United States and Cuba was reread through the relationship between South and North Korea, the values and symbols of two distinct times and places intersected.
The Bussot family’s voyage is presented not merely as an experience of migration in one region, but as an event in which a family chose the direction of its life between different political systems. Their experience brings before contemporary viewers the value and importance in life of liberalism, which safeguards individual choice and freedom of movement.
Raul Bussot Jr. and artist Kim Hongrok sit on the raft during the performance. Behind them, the text documenting the Bussot family’s voyage is visible.
Installation view with the raft installation, portrait photographs of the Bussot family, and the interview video arranged together in one space.
Installation view with the raft installation and the video documenting the 1993 voyage and rescue positioned facing one another.
Exhibition wall displaying portrait photographs of the Bussot family and those who shared the voyage.
Exhibition wall displaying text documenting the course of the Bussot family’s voyage.
The performance did not presume that an experience from twenty years earlier could be repeated exactly. Through the conditions of limited space, time, and food, the work sought to approach one family’s memory and share with contemporary viewers the meaning of their choice to pursue freedom.
According to the Bussot family’s recollection, the first food they ate after arriving in the United States in 1993 was from McDonald’s. Following this, Kim Hongrok and Raul Bussot Jr. ate McDonald’s food on the raft on the final day of the 2013 performance, and this experience led to Kim Hongrok’s second solo exhibition, “A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: McDonald’s,” held later that year.
Kim Hongrok and Raul Bussot Jr. eating McDonald’s food on the raft on the final day of the performance, 30 March 2013
Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon and his family visiting the exhibition. Artist Kim Hongrok is pictured at left.
Choi Siwon visiting the exhibition during the performance. From left: Raul Bussot Jr., Choi Siwon, and artist Kim Hongrok.
Second Solo Exhibition
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: McDonald’s
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: McDonald’s / Diamond dust on hamburger wrapping paper, 2013, Kim Hongrok
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: McDonald’s was Kim Hongrok’s second solo exhibition, held in 2013. The artist applied diamond dust to McDonald’s hamburger wrappers collected in several cities.
For the Bussot family, McDonald’s was remembered as the first food they encountered after reaching the United States; within the work, it appears as a concrete experience of encountering liberalism and capitalist society for the first time. To another viewer it may be an everyday meal or a familiar international brand. The work shows that the same object can carry different meanings and values according to personal experience, place, and time.
The artist applied diamond dust, which commands a genuinely high price and exchange value in capitalist markets, to mass-produced wrappers discarded as waste after use. For the Bussot family, the wrapper is a trace of the moment they first encountered capitalism, while the diamond is a gemstone in which value is concentrated and which trades at a high price within that system.
As waste and gemstone meet on a single plane, the most ordinary trace of consumption—which marked one family’s starting point in capitalism—is connected to one of the system’s extremes, where value is highly concentrated. Without directly naming capitalism through words or slogans, the relationship between the two materials compresses and reveals its broad spectrum of values.
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Chicago, America / Diamond dust on hamburger wrapping paper, 2013, Kim Hongrok
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam / Diamond dust on hamburger wrapping paper, 2013, Kim Hongrok
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Buenos Aires, Argentina / Diamond dust on hamburger wrapping paper, 2013, Kim Hongrok
According to the exhibition materials from the time, the artist collected McDonald’s wrappers from twenty countries with the help of numerous people. Each work was named after the city and country in which its wrapper was collected. The series thus brought together the processes through which a single international brand was produced, distributed, and consumed in different regions.
According to the artist’s records, he requested assistance from Korean embassies in several countries and other organizations in order to collect the wrappers. Choi Siwon informed his international fans about the collection effort, and people living abroad also participated in gathering materials.
The artist recorded that, during the collection process, he received replies from some regions saying that there were no McDonald’s restaurants there. The series thereby also shows that the conditions for accessing the same goods and services differed according to country and political system.
In this series, McDonald’s is both the first food the Bussot family encountered in the United States and an object through which capitalism was experienced concretely in everyday consumption and global production and distribution. By placing an everyday consumer item discarded after use together with a gemstone that carries genuinely high price and exchange value, the work shows how different forms of value are created and exchanged within capitalism.
The process through which a discarded wrapper meets diamond dust, is transformed into an artwork, and acquires new value also connects to capitalism’s operation of creating and expanding value through production and distribution, exchange and creation. The work prompts reflection on the choices and opportunities, the possibility of creating value, and the importance of those possibilities that capitalism—experienced by the Bussot family as the prospect of a new life—opened to individuals.
Works from the series were also exhibited at LA Art Show, held at the Los Angeles Convention Center in 2014.
Third Solo Exhibition
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Military Sex Slave
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Military Sex Slave / Film and installation, 2015, Kim Hongrok
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Military Sex Slave was Kim Hongrok’s third solo exhibition, held from July 23 to August 23, 2015.
Instead of the widely used expression “Japanese military comfort women,” the artist used the words “military,” “sex,” and “slave” in the exhibition title. In doing so, he sought to reveal more directly the nature of the war and institutional sexual violence addressed by the exhibition.
The exhibition used film and installation to record five survivors of the Japanese military “comfort women” system who were alive when the work was produced in 2015: Ok-seon Park, Ok-seon Lee, Soon-ok Kim, Kun-ja Kim, and Il-chool Kang.
The three solo exhibitions formed a continuing examination of how different political systems and histories affect individual lives. Through one family’s choice and movement, the first addressed the value and importance of liberalism. Through the combination of disparate objects, the second considered the values formed within capitalism and their meaning. Through the faces and gazes of five women, the third brought viewers face to face with the consequences imperialism left in individual lives.
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Ok-seon Park
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Ok-seon Park / Projection on cotton, 2015, Kim Hongrok / 00:00:44
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Ok-seon Lee
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Ok-seon Lee / Projection on cotton, 2015, Kim Hongrok / 00:02:19
The work was constructed by projecting films of the five women onto a white fabric installation measuring 2 m in both height and width.
In the films, the five women neither re-enact their experiences of victimization nor deliver scripted lines. They minimize gestures that would stage a particular emotion, sitting in the chair and looking toward the camera. Viewers meet the projected figures, shown at close to life size, at eye level.
According to the artist’s working records, some of the five women asked at the time of filming whether the images were for a news report or a memorial portrait. After hearing that they were being filmed for an artwork, some arranged their hair or changed clothes before sitting in front of the camera.
This structure was connected to a working method that sought to record the five not as figures confined to a single emotion or an image of how a “victim” should appear, but as individuals named Ok-seon Park, Ok-seon Lee, Soon-ok Kim, Kun-ja Kim, and Il-chool Kang.
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Il-chool Kang
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Il-chool Kang / Projection on cotton, 2015, Kim Hongrok / 00:03:45
A visitor facing the late Kun-ja Kim in the work
The same chair on which each of the five women had sat during filming was placed in the gallery. With the chair recorded in the film and the physical chair positioned face to face, the time of filming was connected to the present time of the exhibition.
Viewers could sit in the chair, meet the figure in the film at eye level, and return her gaze. The chair became a medium connecting the five women who participated in the filming with later viewers and enabling them to face one another.
Kun-ja Kim was born in Pyeongchang, Gangwon Province, in 1926. In 1942, she was taken to a Japanese military comfort station in Hunchun, Jilin Province, China, where she was subjected to abuse for approximately three years until liberation, after which she returned to Korea.
In 2007, she testified about her experiences at a hearing of a subcommittee of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs. In 2000 and 2006, she donated 50 million won on each occasion—a total of 100 million won—to The Beautiful Foundation, establishing the basis of the “Grandmother Kim Kun-ja Fund.” With additional donations from members of the public, the fund had supported the tuition of approximately 250 university students who had aged out of child-protection facilities by July 2017.
For her testimony and charitable work, Kun-ja Kim received the Camellia Medal of the Order of Civil Merit in 2014. The work produced in 2015 also records her wearing the medal.
Kun-ja Kim died on July 23, 2017.
After the work was produced, Soon-ok Kim died on December 5, 2018; Ok-seon Park on September 7, 2024; and Il-chool Kang on March 28, 2026. All five women recorded in the 2015 work are now deceased.
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Kun-ja Kim
A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Kun-ja Kim / Projection on cotton, 2015, Kim Hongrok / 00:04:21
This work does not reduce the history of the Japanese military “comfort women” system to a single explanation or emotion. It places the names, faces, and gazes of the five women before contemporary viewers and asks them to consider the consequences that imperialism and war left in individual lives.
The record preserved in the films and the chair used during filming allows later viewers, who can no longer meet the five women in person, to encounter their images and exchange gazes with them at the same eye level.
Authenticity, Clue, Recovery
In the title of the work, ‘authenticity’ refers to the reason the work began and to the essence and fundamental nature of the subjects and events it addresses, beyond the images visible on its surface and familiar judgments about them. Rather than fixing interpretation into a single conclusion, it leaves room to draw closer to that underlying source through different perspectives and circumstances.
Kim Hongrok’s work focuses on providing viewers with subjects and situations from which thought can begin, rather than presenting a single interpretation as the correct answer. This does not mean, however, that the work’s perspective or values are unclear. Through specific people, objects, and events, the artist reveals the values he considers important and enables viewers to encounter their meaning directly.
The “clue” in the title of the work is not a conclusion, but something from which thought can begin. A familiar action, a person’s face, a family’s memory, or a discarded wrapper can each serve that role.
“Recovery” refers less to a complete return to a past condition than to a process of reconsidering events, objects, and people that have become familiar, and seeking to draw closer to their essence.
The A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity series began with the everyday act of brushing teeth and continued through society’s gaze upon an individual, the liberalism revealed through one family’s choice and movement, capitalism and the values formed within it, and the faces of victims of war.
The distinct works are presented as starting points from which viewers may look again at subjects they thought they already knew and consider what freedom and choice, value and human dignity mean in individual lives.