Nowon

About the exhibition

No matter how hard we fight, we cannot escape the absurd repetition of life. It feels like Sisyphus’ punishment, where imagining a new future is no longer possible. Yet within that cycle, we find ourselves reminiscing about the once-possible futures that lingered in the past. Hansaem Kim’s solo exhibition NOWON draws time from a past when we still believed in the possibility of victory, and reveals the artist’s present as he stands on the threshold of the future. In Hansaem Kim’s work, opposing dimensions such as analog and digital, reality and imagination, life and death, luxury and kitsch coexist on a single plane, clashing and ultimately forming intersections. He actively engages with references not only from the digital culture of his time but also from various subcultures such as comics, games, and character merchandise, yet he does not simply borrow them. Instead, he combines two or more genres or mediums, using the dissonance and energy generated between them to reveal both the reality of time and space and inner emotions. These embodied visual images are transformed by the artist into paintings, objects, and game-like structures, constructing a sensorial world view where reality and imagination intersect. In particular, Kim has adopted a strategy of mixing fantasy images with the language of art, using the symbolic visual language of fantasy such as Western religious iconography, occultism, and Ancient divine magic. His recent works have evolved into a distinctive for