Summer Days in Keijo—written in 1937
2007 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
16:47 minutes
Sung Hwan Kim
An early work in Sung Hwang Kim’s career, the video Summer Days in Keijo—written in 1937 is a fictional documentary, the film is based on a non-fiction travelogue, In Korean Wilds and Villages , written by Swedish zoologist Sten Bergman, who lived in Korea from 1935 to 1937. In Kim’s film, a Dutch female protagonist traces Bergman’s path in the present-day Seoul (Keijo was the Japanese name for Gyeongseong, currently Seoul). The protagonist navigates through spaces that have been rebuilt since the 1950s onwards, and the scenes are narrated by a voice-over based on Bergman’s written description of the modern city in 1937. The buildings and the downtown cityscape depicted in Bergman’s book were rooted in Japanese Pan-Asian style urban planning, which no longer exists. Kim skillfully weaves the history of the Korean War and post-war industrialization into Bergman’s narrative. For example, the film features the Saewoon Arcade, an exemplary building of the city’s modernization. Designed by the renowned modern Korean architect Swoo Geum Kim, whose practice followed Le Corbusier’s idea of a utopian city, Saewoon set the tone for how a modern city was to be imagined and envisioned. The film gives an overarching perspective on Korea’s modernization through a total experience of conflated space-time, personal anecdotes, and historical narrative. Meanwhile, a collection of words oscillating between poetry and prose—sounds in between melody and noise that meet at certain moments—resonate with a series of musical chords and become a song, composed by the artist’s musical collaborator David Michael DiGregorio. Here, the time of the work is interrupted by musical time, a time that has different properties and proportions from that of the video. While Kim uses various methods to disturb the linear time of the video, from historical and fictional juxtapositions to revealing the filmic apparatus, the viewer listens to the narrative and makes associations with the images.
In his practice, Sung Hwan Kim assumes the role of director, editor, performer, composer, narrator, and poet. Working with video and performance art, Kim assembles encounters, sounds, sculptures, and images inspired by his alternating homes in Seoul, Amsterdam, and New York. Bringing together Korean culture, the history of performance and film, and inspiration from pioneering artists such as Joan Jonas, Kim’s practice is a robust and complex mode of visual story-telling. Engaging with Korea’s history, modernity, architecture, and social structures, as well as notions of urbanity, domesticity, and matriarchy, Kim merges narrative and documentary forms. The artist often interweaves real footage and interviews from a variety of sources with more poetic sequences of text or choreography. Sound and musical compositions are significant elements in many of Kim’s video works; the soundtracks are often developed by the artist’s frequent collaborator, the musician David Michael DiGregorio, also known as dogr.
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