Jisun Kim김지선

Our Temple imagined a future where digital records have been lost. The project imagined the history of the present through an imperfect restoration process—much like inferring history by analyzing fossils.
It exhibited the fragments of restored imagery that the Artificial Intelligence generated after excavating and analyzing digital records that had been lost online. Alongside the exhibited materials, a performer’s spoken narration provided a narrative structure to a history that does not yet exist.

The Off Tours series, which began in 2021, is a work to experience digital spaces in the form of package tours. Through a computer program created by the artist, the audience is guided through a sequence of websites to experience their landscapes and cultures.
The destination of Off Tours II in 2023 was internet communities. The tour navigated through various internet communities—the uppermost stream where culture is born today, as well as the fiercest battlefields—and explored the indigenous culture of each. The visit showed how the inherent logic of the internet and the behaviors within its communities lead to processes of politicization.

Kim Jisun transplants the experience of a package tour into the form of a web-site tour. Like in a package tour where one travels by a coach, looks around monuments and cultures of the region, and meets other people, Kim will create a program that automatically transports the audience from one website to another. The audience will travel to numerous websites, discovering the history, data, and movements within them. As the first part of a developing series of web-site tours, Web-site Tour is an epic journey filled with hardships, a journey ascending the stream of ideas. The visited web-sites will greet the audience with their artificial landscape, leading the audience to question their own senses.

In the story of ‘El Dorado’, the ceremony of discarding gold into the river is, in fact, an act of transforming forms of the material, and sending it back to its origin. The gold mined from nature was sculpted, and then sent back to nature. However, if what is to be returned is a thought, how can a formless thought transform its forms?
While travelling in South America, the artist met a man named Min by chance, who handed her a USB drive. It contained several games created by Min, each of which was like a book, where his memories and thoughts are expanded.

Through the form of video games that can be repeatedly reexperienced and reinterpreted, what did Min hope to see? And which of his thoughts had to be sent back to their origins, and why? The artist traces and tracks Min’s story as she plays the games he made. By adding her thoughts and revising Min’s original games, she builds a sculpture titled ‘The House of Sorrow’, and invites the audience to join her in the games.

In Deep Present, Kim Jisun takes the emergence of the ‘outsourcing system’ as a pivotal axis that transforms the human cognitive paradigm. Today, outsourcing—originally an industrial invention for cost reduction—has expanded as far as delegating wars to legitimate corporations. Outsourcing leads to a mutated form of impotence and insensibility. Through outsourcing, raw senses such as pain and danger are refined into easily digestible sugar cubes.

Artificial Intelligence marks the culmination of this omnidirectional expansion of outsourcing. Humans are about to delegate their last remaining inherent ability—the ability to reason—to AI algorithms for the sake of accurate and effective processing of mass data. What is the impetus that propels this giant leap? What are the fundamental questions that need to be raised at this pressing moment?

Four Artificial Intelligence characters, given the role to think in place of humans, stand on stage with their own unique voice. These reproductions of human intelligence provide a mirror image that unearth questions underlying this system. An entity that attempts to outsource its inherent ability of reasoning and the entity destined to carry out such task stand face to face, probing into the dispositif called outsourcing.

In a world where senses are blocked up without a way out, anger is trapped, too. Not many options seem to be there. It is suicide when it turns towards your inner world; it manifests as unbridled violence when it moves towards outside. How can we face the pure, uninterpreted violence? “The ways people want to deal with the world have changed from a fundamental feeling of helplessness. As the exclusion and powerlessness from it become deeper and deeper, resetting the world completely seems to be the only way; not because it is realistic, but because it becomes the only thing that can be imagined. A survey asked young people in Korea aged between 20 and 34 about their ideal vision of the future, and 42% of them replied: Collapse, a new beginning”

Inspired by astrophysicists’ thought experiment of seeing the universe from outside the box called the universe, Jisun Kim tries to imagine the outside the box called the world. Under the ideology of capitalism, our sensory experiences are also being outsourced, and thereby, cutting away our sensory connection with the world.

This work begins from the castrated senses. After witnessing online players who kept killing themselves in online games, she wandered online for several months to find them and to interview them in person. In her work, two Teletubbies located in two different online games have a face-talk about players they have seen: the players who lived online like hikikomori in their online home, players who studied 100 ways of dying in online games, or players who spent months on the Minecraft Map to get to the end of the map. A world traveler who experienced the Arab Spring and the 2011 England riots listens to those stories and asks questions.

What kind of exit from the world can we create through this ‘unreal’ sensation? The question itself is a cruel one which entails total denial of oneself. The production asks if we truly want to exit from the game.

“No man’s land” series is a collection of statements of Jisun Kim’s performative works in Central and Latin America and a mixture of unrealized ideas.

There are two major squares in Seoul, Seoul Square and Gwanghwamun Square. Seoul Square is right in front of City Hall and Gwanghwamun Square is in front of the US Embassy in Seoul. All these squares are not functioning as squares due to political situation.

At that time, it was illegal to have demonstrations outside after sunset. And by demonstration they mean the gathering of 2 or more people. Especially for Gwanghwamun Square, almost all activities were prohibited other than casual walking during the daytime.

So Jisun kim developed an innovative device to safely occupy a space and to break the situation abruptly. A black hoody, saying ‘Invisible Man’ in the front, and ‘Pretend You Don’t See Me’ in the back.
In Seoul, Jisun Kim and nearly a hundred people went to the squares during the night time to see if this hoodies are functioning properly. To my surprise, in the most strict Gwanghwamun Square, the police thought a lot about whether they should pretend they don’t see us or not, and actually did pretend they don’t see us in a way, in the end.

Jisun Kim launched a travel agency named ‘anti.no.made tour’.
When the oil-shock occurred, Nam-june Paik was thinking of how to transfer the idea of human without body moving. He called it ‘stationary nomad’.

Anti no made tour conducts nomadic tours without body movement. This freakish tour suggests cyber space tour, pilgrimage to the attitude and others.

‘Pan-Asiatic International Conference(PAIC) ’ is an emerging organization of journalists committed to investigating the political aspects of economy in Asian countries established by Jisun Kim and an international organization having Jisun Kim as a sole member and its main activity is to collect news of guerrilla style and news production.

At the same time of performance, an interview was actually carried out at a waiting room of the theatre being decorated like an office for selecting PAIC journalist and the audiences had watched this scene at the theatre in real time through a screen. Interviewer kept asking the question about the role of journalists and their main issues. Participants of this interview were responded to this interview with having an idea of solving the problem of poverty through generic research on autotroph human being and four-foot marathon being promoted in a series of event encouraging four-foot walking.

There is a very popular expression in Korean which is ‘hul(헐).’ It is usually said when people talk to themselves in a somewhat mocking way when they are baffled, absurd by something, but it can be used as an exclamation almost in any kind of situations, to show you are amazed by something.

In 2010, there was a big regional election in Korea, where the former mayor of Seoul, Se-hoon Oh, ran for reelection, who is one of the worst politicians ever. Jisun Kim wore a t-shirt that said ‘hul’ on it and went to his campaign locations to stand behind him as the background.

Since he was running for the mayor of Seoul, all channels of media paid attention to and broadcasted every one of his move or words, and Jisun Kim stood as the background no matter what he said, creating a situation which was very ‘hul.’

In the same year, G20 Summit took place in Seoul. Again, the press from many different countries delivered the news about the summit live, she wore the t-shirt printed ‘hul’ again and would stand behind the reporters to broadcast my message toward the G20.