5 things to know about Heecheon Kim: Double Poser

Kim works with a moving image practice, and creates works which explore how technology affects our perception of the world. His new commission Double Poser, which is currently on show in our Hayward Gallery HENI Project Space, is built using video game technology, and also ‘played’ as a game, albeit without the viewer playing the game itself.

Also screening within this exhibition is Kim’s 2019 work, Deep in the Forking Tanks. This single channel video records a simulated dive in a floatation tank, filmed with an extreme first person perspective. But for now let us focus on Kim’s latest piece, a work which draws on skateboarding culture, video games, and the brutalist architecture of the Southbank Centre.

Double Poser was created using a game engine

Game engines are software platforms ordinarily used for developing video games. For Double Poser, Kim used the engine Utility, which can be used for both 3D and 2D games, with a combination of lower resolution graphics and more hyper realistic aspects. As with video games, the use of the game engine means that certain elements of the video work are constantly being updated as it plays. Double Poser also incorporates a motion sensor, and so at one point within it, the viewer will see the movement of their own hands reflected on the screen.

Through Double Poser, Kim questions our understanding of the existence of time

One of the reasons Kim elected to create Double Poser using a game engine is due to the ‘no time’ condition they work in. The absence of a base time – games instead borrow the time of the player – within these game engine simulated worlds leads, Kim feels, to an absence of narrative tension. The artist duly asks whether it is possible that as within these manufactured game environments, time in our own world doesn’t really exist.

‘In the world of information, the past does not exist in memory, but as an extension of the present that is available without any temporal gaps, and the future exists as a predictable, optimised output based on current inputs, where chances are overcome,’ explains Kim. ‘So, just as the game desperately hides the fact that time does not pass in it. Does the current state of technology do the same? Do we have a 'standby mode'?’

Kim often seeks to highlight the level of trust we place in technology

As technology continues to play a greater part in our daily lives, we become increasingly blasé to the sharing of data, of information about us and our experiences. Kim views this as a gamification of our daily lives, in which the data we have shared begins to guide the way in which we experience the world around us. The way in which these data-led technologies have become so entrenched in our everyday lives is highlighted by Kim, whose works often incorporate a range of technologies from GPS, to augmented reality, to face-swap applications and beauty filters. The artist shows how, whilst these technologies may seem advanced, we use them so constantly and unthinkingly that it is relatively easy to replicate them in his work.

Skateboarding video game culture was a big inspiration for Double Poser

Though this is Heecheon Kim’s first UK exhibition he was already very aware of the Southbank Centre owing to its history at the forefront of British skateboarding culture, and the appearance of our Undercroft Skate Space in the video game, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4. In Double Poser the work’s characters reference a number of popular skateboarding video games, including Session: Skate Sim, Thrasher: Skate and Destroy and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, before the protagonist ends up inside a similar game. 

The work also recreates the Southbank Centre in remarkable detail

Having previously studied architecture at the Korea National University of Arts, Seoul, Heecheon Kim found great inspiration in the brutalist environment of our Hayward Gallery and Queen Elizabeth Hall. He has duly recreated this landscape within the work, using blueprints of our buildings, and the game engine’s ability to provide real-time 3D rendering,  with incredible attention to detail, down to graffiti in the Undercroft. And so you can sit within the Hayward Gallery and see the same space reflected back to you through the screen in video game form.