Sangwan Shawn Kim
Updated: Aug 28
The 18th Jesa is an interactive memorial installation by media artist and project designer Sangwan Shawn Kim. Within the broader context of his portfolio, Shawn Kim often utilizes light design elements into his installations as well as motion / sensory technology to create experiences which are lucid, engaging, and hypnotic. Shawn’s installations often deal with deeply personal autobiographical narratives ranging from the lingering passing of death to personal spirituality to an ominous sense of surveillance. His moving-image and theatrical projects also often incorporate elements of experimental light design, dance, costume design and usually deal with themes within the broader context of contemporary Korean society and culture.
In the The 18th Jesa, the viewer is transported into an experimental shrine within a darkened room, illuminated only by two LED candles near the floor and two moving-image screens on the gallery walls. The smaller moving-image screen is an interactive display fixated within a dated photograph of the artist’s late mother. Within this portrait is a screen controlled by a sensory-based camera. When figurative motion is detected, the camera converts a reflection of the viewer onto the screen in black and white, blurred, and with a softened haze, followed by the phrase “image remains but details blur”. During a non-motion-detected environment, the 5-inch screen displays the numbered subsequent sequence of the years 2009 to 2026. When the numbers change and transition, they blur and dissolve into particles.
Near the floor, where the two LED candles are located, a miniature shrine contains a wine glass filled with wine preferred by Shawn’s late mother and an ancestral tablet with a caligraphy brush often used in the ritual of Jesa. In Korean culture, Jesa is the ritualistic process of honouring the dead, often through the use of makeshift and deeply personal shrines. The 18th Jesa, within the context of Korean culture, takes what would otherwise be an almost secluded ritual and brings the subject of mourning the dead to a wider audience displayed in the framework of contemporary art within a gallery space.
Shawn Kim’s purpose with The 18th Jesa is not to request from the audience to mourn a person they never met, but rather, serve as a wider process for his personal mourning while simultaneously sharing his feelings about the fleeting moments of memory and the fragility of life. In the larger moving-image screen, an old video of the artist as a child engages with his late mother. This haunting moving-image blurs out her face in order to conceptually convey Shawn’s sense of forgetting distant memories of her, including her face, as time and the years pass by. This experimental artistic shrine not so much serves to preserve the memory of his deceased mother, but rather, serve as a conceptual reminder and conveyance of how the lingering passing of death can slip through memory and dissolve into fragments, as opposed to holistic and preserved experiences.
We will find the interactive scope of The 18th Jessa offers many and varied nuances of conceptually revealing the lingering process of reflecting on death, a personal autobiography of how a loved one shapes the artist’s psyche,even in passing, and all while simultaneously communicating the fragility of memory, time, and life. Beyond the fragility, the installation of The 18th Jessa serves as a structural reinforcement through deeply personalized and conceptually-based notions of turning fragments of residual essence and life-force sustained from recollecting on fleeting echoes of perception. The 18th Jesa is not just a work of art, but also a constructed realm of consciousness which has us collectively reflect on the isolated moments which slip against the speed and machinations of the contemporary digital era. The installation slows us down and puts a focusing of the lens into circumstances attempting to grasp at poetic yet haunting ruminations offering promise to fill the gaps within our sense of inner-emptiness. The integrated technological aspects of the shrine create a sense of disturbance, revealing the distance between acknowledged memory and constructed realities as well as configured perceptions.
