Up Close: Heecheon Kim
By HG Masters
Ordinary life offers the most opportune, most primal stage for horror films—the suburban house, hormone-addled teenagers, domestic routines, even the loyal family pet. Banality, it seems, is a thin, easily slashed veneer. In artist Heecheon Kim’s past video-based works he portrayed hyper-technological South Korean society as one already riven into two disconcertingly unstable realms, with a precarious interdependency on technology that bridges our psychological and virtual spaces. His latest work, Studies (2024), is a two-channel horror film-installation that erases the boundaries between real and virtual, physical and technological, protagonist and victim, leading the viewer into an abyss of narrative uncertainty.