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Laura Hyunjhee Kim is a digital media artist that explores elements of pop culture and internet aesthetics through online and offline works.

Background and Education
Laura Hyunjhee Kim is a Korean American born in 1987 in Palo Alto, California. She moved to South Korea when she was 9, and during her teen years, moved to the US to study biology. Her involvement in a university performance / video venue (Starlight Cinema) helped her develop her passion for video and art making5. Kim has a strong connection to both American and Korea culture, and she frequently visits South Korea. In 2009, she received her BS in Art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2012, she earned her MFA from the San Francisco Art institute, and she is currently a Ph.D student at the University of Colorado Boulder. Kim's focus area of study is Intermedia Art, Writing, and Performance.2

Artsist Influences
Through her university participation with the Mimist Collective, Kim was able to meet her favorite artists. This includes Shana Moulton, Erica Magrey, Nao Bustamante, Laurel Nakadate, Daniel Barrow and Kalup Linzy. Their work inspired Kim to pursue video and performance art on a deeper level. She also had the chance to work with mentors Tony Labat, Tim Sullivan, Allan DeSouza, and George Kuchar through the New Genres program at the San Francisco Art Institute5.

Artworks
Kim's artworks range across multiple medias, and most of them are digital video pieces. These include elements of net art, animation, found footage, and music.1 Her artworks typically feature black backdrops paired bright, neon colors and movement. It is not uncommon for Kim to show herself in her videos, and aside from acting, additional movement is achieved through 2D or 3D animations.

Acting
Kim acts in many, if not most of her videos. This can include dancing, direct dialogue to the viewer, singing, and facial expressions. Kim often portrays herself in a humorous light, and there are multiple personalities that she chooses to display.

Animation
Kim uses flashing, moving images that are typically pulled from the internet. There is an early internet aesthetic to many of the artworks, and text is often included as well. Descriptions can range between psychedelic, retro, haphazard, and dream-like. Kim describes her own work as "engaging with the amateur aesthetics of the internet" with inspiration from "viral memes, lo-fi pop, and kitschy low-budget commercials" 1. The homemade quality of her pieces is purposeful and lends itself to the ideologies behind her work. The images to the right are from Kim's videos and serve as examples of her typical visual style and medium.

Other Story of My Life
Instagram account featuring "semi-autobiographical performances" that alter her social media presence in a humorous and surreal way. It features emoji collages, text, and videos that tell stories.

Consume Like Everyone is Watching
Instagram videos where she interacts with household products. It is inspired by Mukbang and also features Kim dancing to specific songs. The series explores how "online-content-creators transform mundane activities and consumer behaviors into absurd forms of online entertainment as a means to circulate and promote trends on and beyond social media platforms".2

Digital Afterlife (collaboration with Mark Amerika)
Obscure videos that feature dance-like movement, text, and stormy, space-like backgrounds. The videos allow 21st century media to be seen as transformational. The project serves as a commentary on capitalism and a big-data world.2

Sharing Turtle (collaboration withRose Striegl)
This multimodal project takes on a satirical approach to human technology and innovation. It comments on the hype around the "next big thing" and the attention that humans pay to new technologies.3

Promontory Project: A Case Study (collaboration with Jen Liu)
A re-examination of the "visual cultural, and social history of the technological wild west"2. The project takes place at the Golden Spike National Historic Site, and it studies how new communication and tech can change society. The Transcontinental Railroad serves as a main point of study for this project.3

Themes and Ideologies
Kim explores popular trends and elements of consumer technology.1 Much of her inspiration comes from music lyrics, stories on social media, obscure internet humor, and "campy low-budget" style films.5 She also draws upon ordinary moments, such as conversations with strangers in public. Kim's pieces often have a music video style. This stems from Kim's interest in kpop and American music culture, as it expands past a local scale and is consumed globally.5 Kim describes the ideas behind her works in the following quote:

SEICA Human Interaction Labs
This "organization" created by Kim can be considered satirical. It poses as a large project that studies human interaction and technology, but descriptions on the overall goal of SEICA are vague. Kim poses different versions of herself as the members of the organization, and her mission is as stated: "Products" or "prototypes" from this project include complicated smart phones, tablets, and older flip phones. They are described in a way that makes the technology seem new and exciting, however, they are products that have already been massively consumed by people in most areas around the world. This plays on "next big thing" idea that Kim explores in other projects.

While SEICA is not creating actual products and the project may be regarded as fake, Kim's website, personas, and digital compositions are real in an artistic sense. They all work towards Kim's overarching idea of consumerism and humans' relationship to it.

Academic Connections to Themes
Kim's works can fall under the "net.art" genre, as she uses the internet as inspiration for her works and as a platform as well. This type of art comments on web conventions, including advertising, animated GIFs, filter effects, and more7. Kim's pieces often include these elements.

The appropriation and merging of visual culture media (including games, music, photos, video) is a typical practice of web artist6. Kim clearly makes use of this idea, as she borrows from Kpop videos, online clip art, and (purposefully) low quality aesthetics. Early ideas of appropriation stemmed from Dada, as pieces were often collages of pre-existing images. Art is a constant cycle of inspiration, and it is not uncommon to find similar qualities in pieces that are seemingly unrelated. According to Norbert Lynton, ″art has always thrived on art and artists have always used and abused ideas they got from other artists: It is of course the use to which such borrowings are put that justifies them″7

Web art was established in the early 90s, and it allowed artists to create electronic art that combines text, images, 2D and 3D animation6. Kim takes on this practice with an aesthetic that is sometimes not too different from earlier works. Despite this, her pieces take on a modern context and address cultural phenomenon of today.

Solo Shows and Exhibitions
2016 BWP/AiRVI: Laura Hyunjhee Kim (Black and White Projects, San Francisco, CA)

2012 Grey Matter Paradise (Gallery Heist, San Francisco, CA)

2011 Hide and Seek (1308 Gallery, Madison, WI)

2011 Type 3 Toy (Adirondacks Lake Center for the Arts, Blue Mountain, NY)

2008 Featured Student Artist (Van Hise College of Latters and Science Learning Center, Madison, WI)

Awards and Honors
2017 HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance Collaboratory) Scholar Fellow

2013 ArtSlant Award Winner in New Media

2011 New Genres Spirit of Tradition Award (San Francisco Art Institute New Genres Department)

2011 Most Prolific Award (San Francisco Art Institue New Genres Department)

2011 Silver Angel Audience Award (the Society of 23 Biennial, Diego Rivera gallery, San Francisco, CA)

2010 '''Sally Owen Marshall Best in Show Award '''

Citations and Sources
“Laura Hyunjhee Kim.” College of Media, Communication and Information, UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER

“Laura Hyunjhee Kim.” Laura Hyunjhee Kim

Kim, Laura Hyunjhee. “SEICA.” SEICA Human Interaction Labs

Froyd, Susan. “Colorado Creatives: Laura Hyunjhee Kim.” Westword, 21 Sept. 2018

Kuennen, Joel. “Generator/Recycler, Producer/Consumer: Interview with Laura Hyunjhee Kim.” ArtSlant, ArtSlant, 18 Jan. 2017

Colman, Alison. “Constructing an Aesthetic of Web Art from a Review of Artists' Use of the World Wide Web.” Visual Arts Research, vol. 31, no. 1, Intersections of Technology with Art Education, 1 Jan. 2005, pp. 13–25.

Schwartz, Lillian F. "Computers and Appropriation Art: The Transformation of a Work Or Idea for a New Creation." Leonardo 29.1 (1996): 43-9. Web.

Mercedes, Dawn. "Digital Ethics: Computers, Photographs, and the Manipulation of Pixels." Art Education 49.3 (1996): 44-50. Web.