faces

bird

Queer

Edited by Hayoung Chung

Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College

faces

bird

Queer

Queer bird faces

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Sung Hwan Kim: Queer bird faces, Hessel Museum

of Art, Bard College, April 5 – May 25, 2025. Curated by Hayoung Chung as part of the

requirements for the master of arts at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

Edited from the lands of the Munsee and Muhheaconneock people.

Faces In-Between – Hayoung Chung

Room 3: Sung Hwan Kim in Response

The Poems

Exhibition Map and Works

pg 6

pg 15

pg 31

pg 56

Contents

In 2021, at the Gwangju Biennale, I frst encountered Sung

Hwan Kim’s flm Hair is a piece of head (2021). Commissioned

by the Gwangju Biennale Foundation, this flm marks the

frst part of Kim’s research project A Record of Drifting Across

the Sea (2017–), which is still in progress. In the flm, Kim

employs English, Korean, Mandarin, and ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i (the

Hawaiian language—once banned and now reviving) to

shape a nonlinear narrative about early 20th-century Korean

immigrants to Hawai‘i, such as the so-called picture brides.

Particularly notable is the artist’s idiosyncratic juxtaposition of

multilingual subtitles and voice-over—a technique that recalls

Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 flm Rashomon, which famously presents

multiple perspectives on a single event through various

narrators.

Around the midpoint of Hair is a piece of head, the Hawaiian

narration continues while the Korean and English subtitles

suddenly drop away. For viewers without knowledge of

Hawaiian, the minutes-long narration by Ahukiniakealohanui

Fuertes—Kim’s Hawaiian-language teacher—ceases to be

comprehensible.1 Instead, it becomes an unfamiliar sound

in itself, flling the gallery space. This moment of creating

varied information gaps, conditioned by the viewer-recipient’s

cultural background, informs Queer bird faces, an exhibition that

begins by probing such intentional breakdowns in translation.

Faces

In-Between

Hayoung

Chung

00.

01.

Is this omission necessarily a failure in translation? In early

20th-century Hawai‘i, past events involving speakers of

multiple language were often recorded or transmitted in

specifc languages. As a result, these events inevitably exist

in fragmented forms that present a limited viewpoint—

such as this English-language article from Life magazine:

“How to Tell Japs from Chinese.”2 For instance, when a

contemporary Chinese speaker attempts to read and refect

on the phenomenon described in this article in its entirety,

translation inevitably emerges as a mediating force. But Kim’s

translation does not limit itself to faithfully rendering content

for viewers; indeed, the sudden removal of subtitles suggests

another aim altogether.

Here, cultural critic Rey Chow’s note on translation is

particularly relevant: “translation is primarily a process of

putting together,” and so the process of literalness also shows

that the “original” is something that was itself assembled.3

This notion implies that what we call an original text or

original event is hardly static or pristine. Translation, thus,

can reveal concealed intentions or bring to light nuances

lost in a single language. In Kim’s practice, which activates

multilingual storylines rather than a singular, cohesive

narrative, translation illuminates and breathes life into the

faces that exist between lines and words, as well as within

words—faces that might otherwise remain hidden.

The exhibition builds on these ideas through two of Kim’s

flms: the aforementioned Hair is a piece of head and By Mary Jo

Freshley 프레실리에 의(依)해 (2023). Each work demonstrates

how translation extends across media and cultural registers.

For example, the title Hair is a piece of head, when literally

converted into Korean, collapses “hair” and “head” into the

single word 머리 meo-ri, producing “머리는 머리의 부분”

(“The head is a part of the head”)—a paradoxical statement

that provokes visual and linguistic tension. In By Mary Jo Freshley

프레실리에 의(依)해, choreography that originated in Korea is

transplanted and transmitted within the context of Hawai‘i.

It becomes another metaphor for translation, embodying

cultural and temporal differences. Kim’s approach—aiming

for neither perfect clarity nor a singular meaning—treats

translation less as an endpoint and more as a generative

beginning, a space where new interpretations might emerge.

Beyond translation, Kim draws on memoirs, newspaper

articles, museum archives, and oral histories, as well as

knowledge, wisdom, and relationships formed during his

residence in Hawai‘i since 2019. These sources appear not

only as texts with traditional references but also as visual

and aural fragments woven into his flms. For instance, Kim

inserts into his flms re-photographed black-and-white images

of unidentifed women from the Palama Settlement Archives,

as well as sounds mimicking the call of the now-extinct

Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō bird—interlacing archival traces with random,

poetic gestures.

This exhibition adopts a similar methodology, presenting

a cross-section of Kim’s ongoing A Record of Drifting Across the

Sea project. Following a meeting with the artist at his 2024

solo exhibition Ua a‘o ‘ia ‘o ia e ia at the Seoul Museum of Art

02.

In the exhibition space, Blue Stand sits next to these materials,

layering images and multilingual texts—whether wall-

mounted or freestanding—within a blue rectangle. Blue Stand

materializes the idea of footnotes as put forward by gender

studies scholar Katherine McKittrick: the role of footnotes is

“not to master knowing and centralize our knowingness, but

to share how we know and share how we came to know.”6

Individually, each blue rectangle performs the excerpting,

highlighting, translating, and bullet-pointing of source texts

and images, combining acrylic sheets and digital and inkjet

(SeMA), I have excerpted and re-presented a portion of the

exhibited works, annotating them to form another exhibition.

Alongside two complete flms, reproduced images and texts

function as excerpts of Kim’s ongoing research, also tracing his

thought process as refected in “Lessons of 1896–1907” (2018–),

an archive he shares online and has partially presented in Seoul.

Texts by historian Noelani Arista, scanned calligraphy from

artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 1982 book Dictée, and footage

of Korean dancer Kim Cheon-Heung4 appear alongside Kim’s

notes and flms, forming a constellation of meaning. Their

coexistence echoes Japanese haiku, which Kim describes

in his 2019 project statement as a “discrete presentation of

anonymous, quotidian, natural movements that manifest

themselves as historical.”5 So, too, by allowing these

seemingly disparate materials to coexist, does the exhibition

capture a moment in Kim’s ongoing process of making unseen

historical fgures visible.

03.

11

10

prints. Collectively, these citational objects engage with

other archival materials, photographs, and flms, creating an

intricate network of references that challenge didactic texts,

which often aim to convey a single, clear interpretation of

a work.

This methodology also mirrors the approach of this

publication in two primary ways. First, an interview with

Kim—conducted in Room 3 of the SeMA exhibition,

where the artist pointed out for me the various materials

surrounding his flm Summer Days in Keijo—written in 1937

(2007)—serves as a textual reference, introducing the

“grammars” the artist has been developing for years. Like an

exercise in a language textbook, unrelated artworks at a glance

gradually converge around 청출어람 cheong chul eu ram, a four-

character idiom Kim has adopted as a conceptual anchor.7

Second, the section of poems stands as a literary homage to

Kim’s visual grammar. Here, I have chosen nine historical

Korean poems that haunt me with their diverse voices born of

political turmoil or their portrayal of everyday fragments that

only those who have crossed borders can sense. They range

from courtesans’ yearning for independence to a writer’s

discovery of his less-contoured facial profle. The poems

were originally published in early 20th-century Korean

newspapers of various political orientations across the United

States, including The Korean National Herald (국민보, 1913–1968),

local to Hawai‘i, and The New Korea (신한민보, 1909–1980s).

Transplanting them into an exhibition publication from their

original context through excerpting, translating, and editing

raises the questions: What does this process erase and add?

And what does it mean on its own?

The exhibition title, Queer bird faces, derives from one of

the rectangles of Blue Stand, which addresses art historian

Ann Gibson’s commentary on how American artist Isamu

Noguchi’s work was received in limited ways. Kim excerpts,

bullet-points, and translates Gibson’s text, refecting on how

an artist’s identity—gender, race, or otherwise—can limit a

work’s “universal” reception.8 And the face of the artist—or

that of a musician, curator, or any agent—is not the only

factor that can distort dissemination.9 Beyond the title and

wall text on the temporary wall, an iPhone Live Photo of a

bird that Kim took in Amsterdam loops continuously—an

excerpt from an untitled installation displayed in Room 2 of

the SeMA exhibition. Meanwhile, in the hallway, visitors can

hear recordings of the now-extinct Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō bird from the

same installation.

04.

13

12

1 Janine Armin, “Body Double: Sung Hwan Kim’s A Record of Drifting Across the

Sea,” Afterall, no. 57 (2024): 150–169.

2 “How to Tell Japs from Chinese,” Digital Exhibits, accessed February 2, 2025, http://

digitalexhibits.wsulibs.wsu.edu/items/show/4416. Originally published in Life

magazine, December 22, 1941.

3 Rey Chow, “Film as Ethnography; or, Translation Between Cultures in the

Postcolonial World,” in The Rey Chow Reader, ed. Paul Bowman (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2010), 143–62.

4 In the show, his name appears as “Kim Chun-Hung,” as per the suggested credit

line from the National Gugak Center, Seoul.

5 Sung Hwan Kim, Hair is a piece of head (Gwangju: Gwangju Biennale Foundation,

2021), 2–15.

6 Katherine McKittrick, “Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered About the Floor),” in

Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 14–34.

7 See page 19 for more on the defnition, usage, and interpretation of this idiom.

No single closure suffces for these drifting records. As writer

Édouard Glissant states, “the text passes from a dreamed-

of transparency to the opacity produced in words.”10 Or

perhaps there was no absolute truth from the beginning.

The exhibition paves the way for exploring how a story is

constructed and shared—through translating, referencing,

citing, and other actions—and how viewers might navigate

its multiple layers. As these layers accumulate, eventually

forming queer bird faces that embrace this opacity, we may fnally

be ready to meet their real faces.

9 During the exhibition, on April 26, 2025, David Michael DiGregorio—a musician

and Kim’s long-time collaborator—will present a concert piece demonstrating how a

musician’s face can do this.

10 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (1990; repr., Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 1997), 115.

8 The text of this Blue Stand reads:

Queer bird faces (이상 야릇한 새들의 얼굴)

Amy Lyford, Isamu Noguchi’s Modernism Negotiating Race, Labor, and Nation (1st ed.), 1930–1950,

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2018, p. 161

• As the art historian Ann Gibson explains, women, artists of color, and

• homosexuals could not do this “because their audiences would not accept their work as universal.

• Even if they wanted to be universal and said so[,]…

• the dominant society did not read the work that way.”

미술 역사 학자 앤 깁슨 Anne Gibson 이 설명하듯, “[여성, 유색 인종 작가,그리고

• 동성애자의 작업은 범세계적일 수 있다고 관객들이 받아들이지 않기 때문에

• [다른 부류처럼 진보적이고 열린 문화적 관점을 가졌다는 칭송을 받을 수 없다]. 그들이 아무리

범세계적이고 싶고 그렇다고 스스로 말을 해도…

• 사회의 주도권은 그들의 작업을 그렇게 보지 않았다.”

15

This conversation between Sung Hwan Kim and curator Hayoung Chung took place in

Room 3 of Kim’s solo exhibition Ua a‘o ‘ia ‘o ia e ia at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA),

Korea, on December 20, 2024. It represents Kim’s answer to a single question: How are

knowledge and wisdom different? Originally conducted in Korean, the conversation was edited

and translated by Chung. Additional information from beyond the artist’s conversation is

provided in editorial brackets.

Room

3:

Sung

Hwan

Kim

in

Response

There is knowledge, and there is wisdom. Knowledge does

not necessarily become wisdom. I wondered what it might

mean to distinguish between the two within the framework

of an exhibition as a cultural form. Over fve years of research

and exhibition and flm production [within the context of

the series A Record of Drifting Across the Sea (2017–)], I began to

differentiate between them—knowledge as yellow-green blue;

wisdom as bluish blue. From the start, there were distinctions

for things that were unclear, but the justifcation for making

those distinctions at that time have now also been forgotten.

00.

17

16

The text in my 2007 flm Summer Days in Keijo—written in 1937

is drawn from [Swedish zoologist] Sten Bergman’s records,

written between 1935 and 1936 and published in his book In

Korean Wilds and Villages in 1937, 1938, and 1999, in Stockholm,

London, and Seoul, respectively. While Bergman did visit the

Korean Peninsula during the 1930s—at the time, for him,

part of the Empire of Japan—when I flmed at the locations

he described in 2007, none of the places matched what he

documented. Over such a temporal gap, places, objects,

buildings, and sociocultural phenomena could not remain

the same. Yet, when his text is seen alongside my footage, the

viewers of this flm assume the two are identical. This is the

fundamental problem with flm, and with this flm of mine

from 2007.

01.

For instance, in the flm, a shot of a building looking north

from Sejongno [the central avenue] in Seoul is paired with

the [Korean] subtitle and narration: “Keijo’s most impressive

building is the Governor-General’s Palace.” However, when the

flm was made, the Governor-General’s Palace that Bergman

saw and described in his book no longer existed. And [the main

gate of Gyeongbokgung] Gwanghwamun, which is now visible

from that perspective as of 2024, was temporarily disassembled

for restoration during the time of flming. Viewers who are

unaware of the historical context will recognize the building

in this scene as the Governor-General’s Palace. The ignorance

the viewer held prior to watching the flm thus generates a

new—albeit incorrect—piece of knowledge through the flm.

Through their acceptance of this knowledge, they come to

think they have achieved a so-called understanding.

This is also a problem of text. Most readers overlook the

temporal gap between when Bergman wrote the text and

when they are reading it. They read it through the lens of their

current knowledge and perspectives, simply because the words

remain the same and the geographic sites he describes are

still locatable today. Same for translation. Situated in entirely

different space-time, the source and target languages occupy

inevitably differing positions; yet the translator substitutes

sentences using only a limited set of predetermined word

choices. The culture of exhibitions and education, of which

we are a part, similarly notices this gap but often disregards

it, citing constraints of time and budget, and seals the gap in

simplistic and incorrect ways—constantly proceeding without

addressing the issues inherent in the various mechanisms of

the process.

19

18

In this flm, Summer Days in Keijo—written in 1937, the camera

follows [the protagonist, who is Kim’s friend and artist] Mieke

Van de Voort. When I was flming in 2007, the city of Seoul had

announced that the Sewoon Arcade would be demolished the

following year. I thought that, after its demolition, people who

have only seen or remembered the building through facade

photographs would neither be able to see its interior nor imagine

the people who “moved through” it. As you know, the fgures,

buildings, and cities that society remembers is mostly their

surface. While I was shooting this flm, the places, phenomena,

and objects listed in the records are transformed into my flm’s

subjects—most of them are only superfcially recorded in the

flm as a facade. However, Sewoon Arcade (set to disappear

in 2008) is an existing building in 2007, and it was the only

space in this flm where the camera could enter the interior of a

soon-to-disappear subject and follow along a person’s trajectory.

Thus, I shot the scene in which Mieke enters and moves inside

the arcade in addition to its facade. In other words, I wanted to

document the fact that people can enter history and live in it.

But by 2008, Namdaemun, which appeared in the flm, was

wiped out by arson. It was unexpected. Similarly, Mieke passed

away in 2011, and in 2024, so did my father. Even though

aforementioned disappearances might have been documented

outside your work on their own terms, the very devices of these

documentations will begin to disappear. Like this, things happen

outside the work— substituting the past with new knowledge

and wisdom—but the work doesn’t show them. Artists

document through their work, but the contents within the work

may grow or disappear outside of it. Then, to what extent should

an audience encountering this work know? And to what extent

should they not?

02.

03.

청출어람 cheong chul eu ram [is a four-character idiom]. From 쪽

jjok (the plant Polygonum tinctorium Lour), the 쪽빛 jjok-bit (indigo

hue) is extracted [during the dye-making process]. This idiom

refers to when “blue is obtained from the green grass but

is bluer than the grass itself.” It is used to describe when a

student surpasses their teacher. During the extraction, the

hue changes. Let’s call it “knowledge” to know the literal

meaning of this idiom. If one refects on their own life and

infers from this knowledge, then they might think of the

relationships between teacher and student, educator and

educatee, or ancestor and descendant. Some may consider it

wisdom, as they are experiencing life by seeing the plant. Yet

another perspective lies outside the boundaries of knowledge

and wisdom. In Blue Stand, I added the footnote: “Does

the grass feel injustice when they see the blue after being

deprived of what was once theirs?” This is neither knowledge

nor wisdom, but it is a message expressing curiosity about