Hyojae Kim (b. 1993), who works between Seoul and London, engages in multidisciplinary practice alongside ongoing research and writing. Her work explores the subtle boundaries where the body, memory, and identity intersect, tracing the imprints and transformations they leave behind across both physical and digital realms.

In Hyojae Kim’s work, the body is endlessly replicated and transformed within cyberspace, leaving behind ephemeral traces. The artist traces the journey of a body that moves and morphs through a digital realm where freedom and constraint intersect, bearing witness to the moments when the boundary between the physical self and the data self dissolves, giving rise to a fluid, hybrid existence. 

For instance, in her early work Default (2019) and the trilogy Default: SSUL, Z, UNBOXING (2019), Kim explores identity in the digital age. Today, individuals scatter themselves across multiple platforms, continuously shaping and curating their personas.

At one point, Kim remarked that she “often felt disoriented in the world she chose to call ‘reality,’ where she couldn’t easily recognize people’s faces, whereas in the world referred to as ‘dream’ or ‘virtual,’ those faces appeared with startling clarity, lingering in her memory like quiet recollections.” In today’s world, where repeated exposure to others through platforms like Instagram feels natural, the virtual images shaped by carefully curated and subtly altered personas often feel more familiar than representations of people in the physical world.
 
As the boundaries between the virtual and the real grow increasingly blurred, the question inevitably arises: “What, then, is reality—or truth?” Kim sees this tension as a condition in which one must exert control over their own reality in order to possess it. Within that, the individual repeatedly asks, “Who am I, truly?” and begins to choose and perform a personal version of the ‘default.’ 

In her work, ‘default’ is not a fixed starting point, but a fluid essence—continuously reshaped through each new interaction. The digital self is presented as multifaceted, endlessly mutable, and constantly evolving. Her ‘Default’ trilogy captures a generation learning to define themselves through curated imagery, presenting a rhythmic dance interweaving organic and virtual elements.

In the first piece of the series, SSUL, a character named Nara Kim—an influencer active on Instagram and YouTube—appears as a key narrator. Within the frame of a smartphone screen, she appears as a multitude of replicated images, and through a YouTube livestream, she exposes how her Instagram photos have been illegally reproduced and sold as T-shirt prints.
 
Even as she recounts this “ssul” (Korean slang for a personal story or anecdote), Nara Kim’s image continues to morph and multiply. Her face coexists with other self-replicated images, becomes layered with different facial and bodily forms through digital compositing, and is subtly fragmented and transformed. Alert messages that flash on the screen—like “Press your eyes” or “Tap to change”—evoke the performative acts of selfie-taking or using open-source filters. 

Following the end of her livestream, a woman’s voiceover confesses how the endless replication, misuse, and reproduction of her image by countless overseas users has rendered her visual identity increasingly ambiguous, forcing her into a perpetual role-playing of multiple selves. She then defines her own “default” as “a face with location data whose place and country are no longer identifiable.”

In the second piece of the series, Z, a baby named Z dances against a backdrop of techno music and dazzling, rapidly shifting visuals. The background imagery continually fractures and transforms, and Z’s dance accelerates in sync, yet offers no fixed narrative. Here, Z reveals a self-image adorned with flamboyant, layered effects—going so far as to invite others to share the video via AirDrop. 

Unlike Nara Kim, Z actively encourages the world to consume him/her as an image, willingly becoming the image itself. The baby named Z thus symbolizes a not-yet-arrived model of the user-subject—one that embraces and performs within the logic of digital image circulation from the very start.

In the final video, UNBOXING, Nara Kim and Z encounter each other through a video call. They meet not as their real selves, but through avatar-like representations, engaging in a dialogue that is more incoherent exchange than meaningful conversation. Curator Siwoo Kwon explains this moment by noting, “Images no longer serve as tools for communication, but instead reproduce countless others while severing any connection to the individual behind them.” 

In the process of striving to become the image, the original self is lost, and as one’s identity disperses into a multitude of visual forms, the image itself ceases to be something that can be interpreted or understood. The meeting between Nara Kim and Z poses a critical question: In today’s interface-driven world—where everything blends, shifts, and fragments—how can the self be defined at all?

In her subsequent video works Parkour (2021) and Art of Movement (2022), Hyojae Kim imagines a world where everything is reduced to data and interconnected, rendering the notion of a ‘body’ in its present sense obsolete. Through the physical movements involved in the act of performing parkour, she traces the emergence of a new form of identity. 

Parkour, devoid of rules or hierarchies, is a spatial practice that involves responding freely to one’s environment using only the body. It can be seen as an “art of movement” that seeks completion through the union of mind and body, while simultaneously reaching out to others. Kim perceives, in the gestures of parkour practitioners who sense risk and fear through their bodies, an aesthetics of the body that dwells on the edge of death with every breath.

In Parkour, the camera closely follows the movements of parkour practitioners as they navigate their physical environments using only the human body. Through sequences of jumping and falling, the dynamic motion captured from cameras mounted on the body evokes the POV (point of view) perspective commonly found in online games. Meanwhile, in Art of Movement, Kim explores bodily motion within both urban and natural landscapes, reconstructing the fluid philosophy of parkour practitioners.

The artist captures movement from these practitioners as an expansion and enactment of bodily experience. Whether rooted in a solid physical environment or situated within a context where the body is transformed into data, this movement represents a journey toward the unification of body and mind—a continuous process of freely relating to one’s surroundings and sensing one’s identity.
 
Through fully physical movements that traverse life and death—not mechanized or digitized motions—viewers are invited to reconsider bodily sensations and identity at a moment when the boundary between reality and virtuality has collapsed. 

In 2023, she also presented Burning Shell, a work that digitally records the pressure a person wearing parkour shoes called ‘Shell’ applies to the ground, leaving a digital trail on the screen. The intersection and encounter between the performer’s actual movements and their data-translated trajectories evoke a strange, new sensation.

Meanwhile, in Dear Moha (2022), the artist transforms into a digitized body, shedding her physical form to transcend into ‘pure data’ capable of immortality. This video work originates from the narrative of her ancestor, Chungseon Kim (1571–1642). Hyojae Kim delves into the life of Chungseon Kim, a general who naturalized from Japan to Joseon during the 16th-century Imjin War, and explores the complex and poignant identity reflected in the posthumous collection of writings he left behind, Mohadang Munjip. Through this, she reflects on the intertwined nature of his multifaceted identity and her own hybrid existence.

Wearing his armor and transformed into a digital body, Hyojae Kim’s figure splits like a lizard that sheds its tail to survive, only to await the next tail to grow. However, this is less a survival strategy and more a proposition of the possibility that identity—encompassing both body and mind—can be reconstructed in new ways within the digital realm.

In her recent works, Kissing Belt (2024) and Dear the John (2024), consisting of drawings and sculptural installations, the artist metaphorically reveals bodies constrained by social structures, exploring the subtle and delicate gestures between power, vulnerability, and subjectivity. 

To this end, she intersects the concept of “Hospital Aesthetics” with the practical art of the dominatrix—a woman who takes the dominant role in BDSM culture—creating a symbolic and sensory bodily dialogue around care, control, and submission.

Kissing Belt and Dear the John appear as poetic gestures, focusing on the two concepts of ‘self’ and ‘other’—fragile and often conflicted by intimacy and power. Within the complex desires and vulnerabilities where both seek and lose each other, these works attempt to form relationships. 

Through this, Hyojae Kim unravels how bodies concealed and constrained by society reclaim subjectivity and identity, proposing intimate encounters charged with the tension of coexistence between strength and vulnerability.

In this way, Hyojae Kim’s work is a journey that traces and explores the traces humans leave behind in both physical reality and virtual spaces in today’s digital era. The traces she collects and records serve as pathways toward profound themes of gender, care, and resilience, allowing us to observe and imagine how human identity adapts and transforms. 

As technological advancement accelerates and the binary boundaries between reality and virtuality, material and immaterial become increasingly blurred, her work invites us to pause and reflect on human identity — fluid and ever-changing — as it continuously engages with an environment where freedom and constraint coexist.

 ”In conclusion, my work aspires to evoke dialogues on the delicate, fluid nature of identity, where memory, history, and digital essence converge and intermingle. Through archival journeys, personal mythology, and poetic language, I seek to reveal the fragile resilience of bodies and their stories, exploring how identities survive, adapt, and metamorphose within real and imagined spaces. This journey invites a vision of identity that is richly layered, honoring multiplicity, survival, and the transient beauty of transformation.”     (Hyojae Kim, Artist’s Note) 

Hyojae Kim earned a BFA in Painting at Ewha Womans University, and graduated with an MFA in Intermedia Art from the Korea National University of Arts. She is currently pursuing an MRes (Master of Research) at the Royal College of Art in the United Kingdom. Her major solo exhibitions include 《No Trace》 (Elephant Space, Seoul, 2022) and 《Default》 (OS, Seoul, 2019).
 
Kim has also participated in numerous curated group exhibitions both domestically and internationally, including 《Seoul Ghost》 (Upper Gulbenkian Gallery, London, 2024), 《Frieze Film Seoul 2023》 (Insa Art Space, Seoul, 2023), 《flop: A Dialectic of Rules and Fouls》 (Seoul Olympic Museum of Art, Seoul, 2023), 《Right to Mother》 (Hessel Museum, New York, 2023), 《Shift》 (NARS Foundation, New York, 2022), 《Set Up Your Profiles》 (Coreana Museum of Art, Seoul, 2021), and 《Follow, Flow, Feed》 (ARKO Art Center, Seoul, 2020). 

In addition, Kim participated in the NARS Foundation residency program in New York in 2022 and The Factatory residency program in Lyon in 2021. Alongside her artistic practice, she has also engaged in extensive research activities.

References

• 김효재, Hyojae Kim (Artist Website)
• 김효재, 작가노트 (Hyojae Kim, Artist’s Note)
• Outsight, 권시우 - "Be my Z" : 언박싱Unboxing된 미래를 기다리며 (Outsight, Siwoo Kwon - “Be my Z”: Waiting for the unboxed future)
• Adocs, 김효재 개인전 <디폴트Default>의 도록 (Adocs, Hyojae Kim Solo Exhibition “Default” Catalogue)
• 엘리펀트스페이스, 노 트레이스 (Elephant Space, No Trace)
• 아르코미술관, 2023 아르코미술관 X 디지털아트페스티벌 타이베이 스크리닝 프로그램 (ARKO Art Center, 2023 ARKO Art Center × Digital Art Festival Taipei Screening Program)