Kim Heecheon questions technology at Seoul Museum of Art

The Seo-Seoul Museum of Art is currently showing Kim Heecheon: Moles, a solo exhibition which presents recent works by the artist that critically approach issues of contemporary technology and visual culture. The exhibition takes an in-depth look at the impact that contemporary visual technologies and AI are having on how self-identity is perceived within a virtual reality environment. Kim Heecheon has established a name for himself through his complex video installations, which are firmly rooted in his own experiences and expressed in the contemporary digitized global environment.

In his first video work, Lifting Barbells (2015), Kim Heecheon's premise “The world has become a screen” makes a telling revelation: in a world propelled by images, screens no longer serve as a medium for reproducing reality, but have rather become an environment for producing it. In Every Smooth Thing Through Mesher (2018), reality in the future will be “negotiated through and captured through screens as the only reality that can be perceived.” At this intersection of the digital and the physical, the two perpetually engage in a ceaseless cycle of birth and reconstruction, creating a plane where identity acquires new valency.

The current exhibition focuses on the artist's latest works, especially those created since 2023, consisting of games, videos and photos commissioned by Seoul Museum of Art. Forming – in the artist's words – a spiritual series, CutterIII (2023) and Double Poser (2023) are two autoplayed games made with the game engine Unity. The artist takes a boldly innovative approach by experimenting with the game engine to see whether it can serve as a new image production tool. Aside from that, he considers the notion of changing temporality in an information-driven world, as the games provide a platform where the temporal and spatial planes and narratives shift.

In his newest work, Lemon (2026), the eponymous “mascot” of this exhibition appears as the main character. Initially inserted by the artist in the preceding two works, a mole burrows a tunnel between them, acting as a double spy connecting the two worlds. He also symbolizes the desire to break off the shackles of technological capture. In Cured (2026), Kim Heecheon uses AI to generate a multichannel video in which he addresses the changes that the evolving image ecosystem will have on human perception and perspective.

Kim Heecheon: Mole is open at Seo-Seoul Museum of Art from August 20 to November 11, 2026. The first in a series of special exhibitions by the museum focusing on major contemporary South Korean media artists, the goal of these exhibitions is to take a multifaceted approach to their creative worlds, support the production of new works and expand the proliferation of artistic knowledge and forms.