Sung Hwan Kim
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For more than two decades, Sung Hwan Kim (b. 1975, Seoul; lives and works in Honolulu) has developed a distinctive artistic practice that intertwines video, music, storytelling, performance, drawing, sculpture, and architecture. His installations unfold as immersive environments where personal memories, historical events, folklore, rumours, and myths are woven together into poetic narratives that resist fixed interpretation.
Working in close collaboration with musician and composer David Michael DiGregorio (dogr), Kim creates works in which sound and image function as equal narrative forces. Voices, songs, and fragments of stories move across time and place, connecting intimate experiences with broader questions of migration, translation, displacement and belonging. Rather than presenting history as a stable sequence of facts, Kim approaches it as something embodied, remembered, retold, and continuously transformed.
The exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall builds upon “Protected by roof and right-hand muscles”, the largest European survey of Kim’s work to date. First presented at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and curated by Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide in close collaboration with the artist, the project later travelled to ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. As both artist and exhibition designer, Kim reshapes the exhibition for each venue, rearranging film environments, architectural elements, and performative works to create new relationships between the artworks and the space. Developed in dialogue with the original exhibition, the Bergen presentation has been extensively reimagined for Bergen Kunsthall and includes several new works and site-specific interventions. Bringing together works from across Kim’s career alongside the new productions, the exhibition marks the first major presentation of Kim’s work in Norway. In conjunction with the exhibition, David Michael DiGregorio (aka dogr) will perform a version of an ongoing song cycle, which extends his long-term musical collaboration with Kim through sound, text, voice, and narrative.
An accompanying monograph is published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König (2025) in collaboration with the participating institutions, including Bergen Kunsthall. The exhibition is supported by The Korean Foundation for International Cultural Exchange (KOFICE).
Sung Hwan Kim (b. 1975, Seoul) lives and works in Honolulu, Seoul, and New York City. Recent solo exhibitions include the Seoul Museum of Art, ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, the Van Abbemuseum, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His work has also been presented at the Venice Biennale, Hawai‘i Triennial, Gwangju Biennale, and Berlin Biennale. Kim is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, and the Karl Sczuka Grant Prize. His work is in the collections of Leeum Museum of Art, the Van Abbemuseum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate Modern. Recent writings include “Brick Is Gay,” in Spectrosynthesis Seoul (Art Sonje Center); “The Stone as in a Shape,” in Joan Jonas: The More-than-Human World (Nam June Paik Art Center, Youlhwadang Publishers); and Sung Hwan Kim: Ua a‘o ‘ia ‘o ia e ia 우아 아오 이아 오 이아 에 이아 (Seoul Museum of Art, Rasun Press).
