By Rick Vacek | November 11, 2024
When she finally was able to sit in her exhibition and take it in, when at last she could truly reflect on the joyful challenge of creating this captivating merger of movement and peace with her friend Surabhi Saraf, Dr. Laura Hyunjhee Kim fulfilled what has become her measure of artistry.
She cried.
“Something happened,” said the Assistant Professor of Visual and Performing Arts at The University of Texas at Dallas. “I just felt so enveloped and transported.”
That’s the perfect description of the inspiration within Kinmakers: Hidden Songs in Our Mother’s Dreams, the multimedia gallery in the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Jr. Athenaeum.
The wave of movement on the three-sided screen, which Kim calls “a blob named ‘The Hum,’” envelops you in 20-minute loops. The resultant peace transports your mind to places not visited for years, if ever.
Talk of the Crow Museum of Asian Art attraction already has spread across multiple academic disciplines on campus. When Kim and Saraf overheard a business major and a computer science major saying, “We heard about this and wanted to come see it,” they introduced themselves and were startled by the students’ enthusiasm: “Oh my gosh, you’re the artists?”
Kim is equally appreciative of students’ inevitable questions.
“The same questions over and over, which is so touching because a lot of them are non-art majors,” she said. “I keep hearing students say, ‘I haven’t been to an art museum in forever.’”
But one question almost always comes first:
How did you make it?
The answer is like the exhibition itself. It’s multifaceted.
The story behind the creation of the gallery’s wavy video – the blob – starts with a simple fact: Saraf built it by utilizing Unreal Engine, a tool most often employed in designing computer games.
The meaning behind the blob and its accompanying hum is far more complicated. It represents Kim’s friendship with Saraf.
“Surabhi and I wanted to dig deeper into this blobby side of porousness, of self,” Kim said. “What happens when you dissolve boundaries and become selfless and open space for vulnerability, for interaction? We started to dig deeper into our personal histories, and it also became about friendship.”
The pair met when Kim was an MFA student at the San Francisco Art Institute, which has since closed, and Saraf was an artist based in the Bay Area.
“Somehow we’ve always been in sync even though we have our own practices,” Kim said.
They previously teamed up on numerous projects, including a collaborative called The Centre for Emotional Materiality (CEM) and on a San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) performance installation with a fill-in-the-blank name, Beyond All Polarities, We Are _____.
The idea process of the O’Donnell Athenaeum exhibition got them talking again about Quantum Listening, a book in which musician and composer Pauline Oliveros described the concept as “a manifesto for listening as activism.”
“We started sharing stories about our mothers and mothers’ mothers and ancestors to explore the whole-body listening practice of kinmakers,” Kim said. “Kinmaking starts from quantum listening – a practice of not only listening to our immediate surroundings but also beyond what can be directly heard, listening simultaneously across time and space, all at once.
“It’s about opening up to various levels of attention, attuning through your whole body. What happens when you listen with your hands and your feet? How does that resonate beyond yourself, reach others, and hopefully expand into a broader, tender sensation of what it means to be fully loving and caring?”
But the blob is only part of the attraction.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is the seashell-like vessel that contains a video of two hands coming together – another symbol of the artists’ friendship. It took two days to take the video Kim created and get it to fit perfectly in the vessel with the help of Igloo, a shared immersive space company.
Kim wanted to put water or sand in the vessel but was told that those elements were not sustainable in this space. Undaunted, she created an illusion that makes the video look as if the hands are moving through water.
What makes it even more striking is that, to see the vessel, the viewer must get up from the custom, low-slung chairs or the benches against the wall and stand next to it. That, in turn, incorporates the blob and the hum into the overall sensation.
“There were a lot of variables, but I didn’t have to change any of the video. It just kind of worked. There’s some magic there,” she said. “If you consider each element of the multimedia installation, the expansiveness of the giant shimmering blob on screen invites a more fluid and open interpretation. So, in turn, we wanted the vessel to be an intimate and personal space, a special (other)worldly portal for kinmakers.”
The blob. It keeps coming up. It’s time for Kim’s blob education – her blobucation, if you will – of how her upbringing in Palo Alto, California, and subsequent moves to Republic of Korea, Wisconsin, back to California, Colorado and now Texas led to such a diverse concept:
“The blob is how I define my practice. I always start with that. I’m bilingual, bicultural. I always felt like I was floating between various cultures – the internet being a culture as well – and different villages of social media.
“I operate like the blob. I like to play with language. I consider it blobby – it always can be unfixed, unlearned.”
She even wrote a book about it, Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs. It’s full of bold blobservations, such as:
“This book has no definitive beginning or ending. You and I are creating this experience together.”
Contemplate those words as you stand in the middle of Kinmakers. Feel the magic.
The multimedia gallery started attracting people well before it opened. Kim noticed that workers would take time out from installing museum pieces to relax in the room.
It continues to be popular now that it’s open – the museum’s hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. In the first survey about the multimedia gallery, 66% of respondents said the exhibition prompted personal reflection “very much” to “extremely” and 97% said they would recommend it to other people.
It is much more than a place for students to relax and enjoy the first chapter of Kinmakers, which runs through February. They are learning here. They feel it.
Their initial reactions astounded Kim.
“They had their own interpretation of the piece, which was so poignant and added a lot of layers – things I didn’t even think about,” she said. “I realized that it spoke to them, too. They were very emotional. Many of them were saying, ‘I was thinking about the title, how it made me think about my mom and being inside my mom’s womb – just a cozy sensation of being hugged.’”
Unlike the blob, there is nothing vague about Kim’s delight with the most important project of her life.
The title, which finally came together after “drafts and drafts and drafts,” feels just right:
“We shuffled through a word salad. It could have been shorter, but we wanted it to be a statement that retained its lyrical poetry.”
Working side by side with her close friend and performing together at the exhibition’s opening event makes the result even better:
“We’re always so remote. We come together and it’s this very heightened sensation of preparation.”
And another bonus … she can share it with her students and colleagues:
“Often when I present a project I do it elsewhere, so I travel or the work travels. Not many people in my immediate community get to see me perform live, so this has been really special – to be able to do all that at once.”
No wonder she cried.
“If it makes me cry and feel emotional, it means I opened something while transforming with the piece,” she said. “The work is so deeply personal.”
It tends to have that kind of effect. But wasn’t that the blobjective?
Time passes quickly in the multimedia gallery.
Sitting back in the chairs is like laying on a blanket and watching the clouds drift by or stars shoot through the sky.
The blob washes over your eyes, challenging them to stay open.
Am I in outer space? Underwater? In a lava flow? An impossible combination of all three?
Or am I indeed in the womb? It’s hard to tell. It changes from minute to minute.
You try to remember if you’ve seen this part of the loop before, but before you know it your eyes are closed again and you see the stars of your dreams.
Everyone’s interpretation will be different, of course. This is just one. You might even have a different feeling every time you visit. Kim does.
But anyone who takes it all in with an open mind probably will react with a feeling of peace … incredible peace.
And maybe a few tears.