Sword & Sorcery

About the exhibition

Fragments of images escaping from the world of fantasySword and Sorcery is one of the sub-genres of fantasy consisting of supernatural elements such as sorcery, monsters, heroes, angels, and devils. Hansaem Kim uses specific adventurous stories and narratives from the genre as a framework of his subjective imagination rather than using them as a reference. Within the boundary he sets, Kim conducts an experiment on unrestrained layout of icons and space design. Kim’s works feature a mixture of superstitious symbols and unrealistic icons. Gold, stones, jewels, and glasses are examples of shamanistic symbols, and dragons, monsters, angels, swords, and unicorns are the icons. However, these icons are somewhat distant from dramatic narratives or spectacular scenes of collision that the fantasy genre typically adopts. The virtual beings that are brought into the real world by Kim are not a subject of worship, awe, or fascination; they are rather unnatural and incomplete. The disharmony appears to be derived from some elements in the making process. Above all, direction errors that are intentionally created between analog and digital are emphasized. Kim draws every single bitmap image with computer tools in aged-long 2D interface games, and prints them on flat papers, then attaches them to structures. This process may appear greatly outdated, as today’s state-of-the art display technologies achieve the virtual world that looks more real than the actual one, thereby nullifying real d