Soni Kum is an interdisciplinary artist who was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan as a third-generation Korean.
She works in a variety of mediums including film and video, installation, performance, writing, photography, drawing, and dance. Her early artworks attempt to shed light on fragmented pieces of darkened history and realign them into more complex and personal storytelling.
After working on activist art projects with North Korean migrants in South Korea for several years, she began to explore the theme of ritual in her performance/ installation works. Her ongoing art project is to transform the relationship between the living and dying in contemporary society by attaining ultimate healing within ourselves.
Soni Kum received an M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts in the United States in 2005 and a Doctor in Fine Arts from Tokyo University of Arts in 2011. Her work has been exhibited at numerous art spaces and film festivals around the world, which include the USA, Japan, Korea, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Philippines, China, Cuba, UK, and Myanmar. She has taught in several universities in South Korea for 4 years since 2011 and received the Excellent Lecturer Award from Yonsei University.
She was based in London, the UK as an artist in residency, a grant awarded by Pola Art Foundation, Japan from Spring 2016 till Winter 2017, and was doing research as a researcher at Kingston University, Department of Art and Architecture, and Live Art Development Agency.
She has been based in Tokyo, Japan since 2019.
Her recent projects include “morning dew” funded by Kawamura Arts and Cultural Foundation Socially Engaged Art Support Grant.
http://www.kacf.jp/pdf/vol2_en.pdf
Kum was working as a Senior Assistant Professor position in the School of Global Japanese Studies at Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan (2021-2023) and she is an Associate Professor at the Department of Media and Communication Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Hosei University. (2024-)
Artist Statement
Growing up as a member of an ethnic minority on the periphery of world geo-politics, I came to pay attention to an insufferable split between two worlds, and to ask how I might fuse these apparent but fatal divisions. I have continued my search for several years.
My art practice is to create a new, but also profoundly old envisioning of an invisible, uncertified, and mystic realm of our world today. It may be called a realm of the unconscious, dreams, and so on, but certainly, it is another world, which we have been dreaming for, the world beyond suffering. "There has to be something beyond this pain, torment, and misery," is a common predicament which human beings have been questing for in the far distance, as a faint image. Like a mirage, it has never been realized for us.
In my work, I slit the image we see in everyday life and penetrate to fuse into another realm of our consciousness, which is a utopian non-bodily space, where only our conscious effort matters. By suggesting and illuminating the image ordinarily unattainable in this physical world, I intend to dissolve the core block of our frozen psyche, which is ultimate healing within ourselves.