The Promise of If

PLATEAU Samsung Museum of Art is pleased to present The Promise of If, a solo exhibition by APT artist Minouk Lim. Since making a breakthrough onto the Korean contemporary art scene with her collective practice in the late 1990s, Lim has formed a singular artistic vision that encompasses a broad range of works including installation, video, and performance in addition to numerous publication and educational projects. Over the years, Lim’s oeuvre has consistently focused on the overlooked places and people amidst the chaos of rapid urbanization process in Korea. Her video works merging performance and documentary practices have captured the lives and memories erased by time.

Recalling the memories of those vanished in time, Lim’s poetic oeuvre incorporates unconventional materials such as liquids, latex, wax, feathers, and bone fragments to create highly delicate organic forms. Additionally, the artist often layers acoustic and tactile elements like sound, light and heat onto her works, creating a level of emotion that reaches beyond materiality. Affirming the dynamics of aesthetics and politics defined by Jacques Rancière, Minouk Lim continues to address the contradictions of society while maintaining the subtle tension between social awareness and aesthetic expression.

Bringing the artist’s past and present work together in an entirely new installation, this exhibition realizes Lim’s long-standing interest in the North-South divided Korea and the consequent issues of the dispersed families. The exhibition takes its theme from the 1983 KBS live broadcast “Finding Dispersed Families”, as it empathetically looks back on the remaining traces of the diaspora that is inevitably fading away over time. As the 70th anniversary year of the Korean Independence Day comes to a close, this exhibition hopes to provide a meaningful reflection on the tragedies of our modern history.