Sung Hwan Kim: A Record of Drifting Across the Sea

In A Record of Drifting Across the Sea (2017–), Sung Hwan Kim looks at histories of migration. The artist parses the traces –archival and bodily – left by undocumented Korean migrants who came to the US by way of Hawai’i at the turn of the twentieth century, and ponders over their impact on other migrant and indigenous communities. As an ongoing film and installation series, comprising two chapters and a third in progress, A Record unsettles the limits of the ‘one work’ with its distributive, open-ended and collaborative nature.

In this speculative inquiry, Janine Armin explores each chapter in Kim’s multi-layered work as a mycelial network of feelers entangling and extending the wider work in-process. Engaging history through embodiment, folklore and myth, as much as through archival material, Kim navigates and crosses the boundaries between displacement and belonging. Focusing on the artist’s attempt to escape from representation, Armin illuminates and attends to the different stories and non-sovereign ways of being together towards which his work points us.

This title is part of the One Work book series, which focuses on artworks that have significantly changed the way we understand art and its history.

Poetic and trenchant, Janine Armin’s beautiful book is more than an exposition or analysis of Sung Hwan Kim’s A Record of Drifting Across the Sea – it is a duet with the work. Armin engages with Kim’s practice through all available means: art history and personal memory; shared conversations informed by critical theory, sensation and dreams. This book becomes a model for how to engage with works of visual art.

– Chris Kraus, author of The Four Spent the Day Together

Captivating and engrossing, Janine Armin’s book on Sung Hwan Kim’s A Record of Drifting Across the Sea is a perfect encapsulation of lived experience that rings true for both the artist and the reader. Bringing the reader intimately close to an artwork through text and images is a magic feat that couples the artist’s own dedication with the author’s intelligence and insight. I enjoyed the entire experience offered by this gem of a book!

– Maile Meyer, Kanaka Maoli community advocate and publisher, founder of Native Books