intellectual and artistic rigour would be a part of
her character as well as her work.
I was delighted to discover that this was indeed
the case, and so we invited Ayoung Kim to bring
that work to Melbourne, complimented by a new
work, Porosity Valley, Portable Holes, exploring
migration and communication, land and peoples.
During her time in Australia earlier this year,
Ayoung spoke with me about her work and her
practice. The whole interview will form part of a
broader podcast in the future, but here is an edited
excerpt of that conversation.
JH: Ayoung Kim, tell me about your life.
Specifically, how did you come to be in Paris?
AK: Well, it was in 2015 that I moved to Paris. It
was for a residency, at the Palais de Tokyo, a part
of the cultural exchange between South Korea and
France, commemorating 130 years of friendship.
JH: What inspired In This Vessel We Shall Be Kept?
AK: The work in the Palais de Tokyo—the choral
music, the diagrams and images—all derived from
the architectural idiosyncrasies and specificities of
the Palais Garnier, that gigantic monument based
in central Paris. It (the Palais Garnier) has a huge
underground lake underneath it, which is actually
a quite mystical artificial reservoir that was made
by natural floods.
I wanted to mix it with my own viewpoint and
the ancient mythology around the Great Flood.
The story is very commonly found in different
mythologies around the world. What we know
as the Noah’s Ark story is also in the Islamic
Quran. And many people believe that the epic
of Gilgamesh was the original of these stories.
Imagine … the Palais Garnier, this huge building
made of heavy marble stones, is floating
on water…
JH: To clarify, Palais Garnier is the opera house
about which The Phantom of the Opera is
written, and the lake in the basement is the one
immortalised by Gaston Leroux, and Andrew
Lloyd Webber?
AK: That’s right.
JH: Going back to just before you were an artist,
you worked in motion interactive graphic design?
AK: Yes, in the early 2000s, it was booming, the
bubble of IT industries in South Korea and all of
the world. I worked on many promotional videos
for MTV, and ads, some just 30 seconds, made to
be promoted online.
JH: So what was your “eureka” moment about
being an artist, the first moment that you decided
to turn right towards pure art, instead of left
towards commercial or paid work?