The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is pleased to welcome the Korean artist Kim Heecheon to present the Swiss premiere of his acclaimed film Every Smooth Thing through Mesher (30 min, 2018).

Kim Heecheon’s works deal with how the contemporary people who are accustomed to the internet, digital devices and smartphones recognize the temporal and spatial conditions of the world surrounding us and how the world actually works based on those perceptions.

“We have stopped perceiving the world as an abstract version of the world and perceive it as the world provided through the timelines which flow down our smart devices. As we are able to receive information about almost the whole world instantaneously while connected to the internet, we have stopped exploring impressions in the world and positioning ourselves in the world by ourselves. We think we don’t need to do this because we believe the world is naturally like that. We just live in each other’s timelines.”

In this age, our future hides itself behind the outline of the present and is no longer visible, in the same way that Pikachu hides behind the flowerpot in the recent demo of Pokémon Go. Do we live in the past, the present or the future? Are we the back-up data of ourselves or data that is yet to be rendered?

Every Smooth Thing Through Mesher, originally commissioned for the Gwangju Biennale 2018, is willing to raise these questions on a summer night waiting for a typhoon.

Kim Heecheon (b. 1989, Korea) studied architecture at the Korea National University of Arts Seoul. Since 2015, his works have increasingly been shown in an international context, including 2016 at the SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul, Seoul Museum of Arts, 2016 at the Kunsthal Aarhus, 2016 and 2017 at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, 2017 at the 15th Istanbul Biennale and the Roskilde Festival in Denmark, 2018 at the 12th Gwangju Biennale, Nam June Paik Center, Seoul, and Chronus Art Center, Shanghai, and 2019 at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila. Solo exhibitions were shown in 2018 at the Doosan Art Center, New York, and the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. Kim Heecheon is a winner of the Mirae Award of the Parkgeonhi Foundation 2013 and the Doosan Yonkang Art Award 2016. In 2018 he was Artist-in-Residence of the Doosan Yonkang Foundation in New York. Kim Heecheon lives and works in Seoul, South Korea.