“Shaping the World”
Soyeon Ahn
* Siha Kim’s recent work Earth Theater (2025) resembles, as its title suggests, a scene from a stage production. Or perhaps it is better described as a situation rather than a scene, a fragment that has casually broken away from a continuous flow of time. Individual stage lights face one another from opposite directions, casting light toward the center and tracing an invisible circular orbit, much like the sun and moon illuminating the Earth. At the center of this imagined orbit stand two folding screens placed back to back, while an upright metal plate mounted on wheels evokes, like a riddle, an unknown axis of vast and weighty time. Everything appears still, yet carries traces of movement, traces of life. Whether something has disappeared or has yet to emerge, there is neither narrative nor form. Upon the traces of an empty movement, light and motion alone continue to flicker without rest.
As though motion has been deliberately halted at a point suspended between material and form, Earth Theater awakens an awareness of alienation and absence on a visual-perceptual level. How can flashing light, the solid materiality of metal, or vivid ropes spread openly across the floor evoke visual alienation and absence? There is no escaping it. The work produces a visual illusion in which sky and earth, sea and sky, and all boundaries seem to dissolve into one another. For instance, a tree branch placed on a pedestal before one metal folding screen creates a perceptual shift when viewed against another folding screen behind it, where fragments of bulbs are arranged across the floor. The gap between the microscopic and the monumental, the tremor of the eye responding to red and blue light, and even the paradoxical tension between life and death generated by what is disappearing and what is yet to emerge ripple before the viewer like waves, one after another. For this reason, even as the work invites deep visual immersion, it soon confronts the viewer with a sense of visual emptiness. Siha Kim refers to this as an “unfinished world.”
* “For some time now, I have been fascinated by a small modular theater, the metallic friction sounds produced by its materials, and, in a different sense, the scents of grass, flowers, and forests in their primordial state rather than artificial fragrances. I am also drawn to the materiality of seeds and bulbs that condense all of these elements. More precisely, I am interested in everything that exists in a state of mixture, crossing between the material and the immaterial. (…) Most things we perceive as perfect are closer to errors of perception and sensation. We simply choose to believe they are perfect. Then we attach all kinds of reasons to them and grant them legitimacy. There is an image of perfection that has been unilaterally defined by the majority. We often come to believe that the world of a romanticist—swept up by hope without any real plans—is a flawless and perfect one. (…) For this reason, in this exhibition, I seek to construct an experimental space for sculptural poetics through unequal and unfinished forms, forms whose completion is not guaranteed, forms that remain in a state of suspension, their future identity still unknown.” (Excerpt from Siha Kim’s synopsis of Earth Theater)
Earth Theater resembles the backstage of a theater before the curtain has risen, or perhaps after it has already fallen. Siha Kim appears to have no intention of raising the curtain again. This endlessly deferred situation—or, in the artist’s words, this state of suspension—intersects with the nonlinear perception it evokes within the theater, becoming an even greater enigma.
* In Perfect World (2025, Seoul Art Space Geumcheon PS333), a two-person exhibition with Ye-eun Min, Siha Kim highlighted several key themes that run throughout their practice through the new work Earth Theater. The stage and theater suggest the boundaries between reality and unreality through which the artist constructs the work. These may also be understood as boundaries between the visible and the invisible, or perhaps as boundaries between opposing directions, like those between beginning and end, or between the raising and lowering of a curtain. The enigmatic sense of dissonance felt between a severed tree branch placed on a pedestal and a bulb-shaped sculpture bound with rope subtly overturns perception, much like the imperceptible transition between day and night. Another recurring theme is the irony of life and death. Previously, in works such as Confession: A Rose that Burns the World (2025) and Lost Garden (2024), and the Piece of Sculpture series (2023), the artist explored the irony of a world in which life and death coexist in an absurd and inseparable manner. One might think of the abstract sense of scale and weight between life and death evoked by the volume of dried flowers laid out neatly like the bodies of the dead.
Earth Theater captures, as a continuation of this inquiry, a moment in which the self (the body) and the stage, reality and unreality, life and death—all of these heterogeneous elements—converge. Alongside it, by placing Bed (Piece of Sculpture) (2025) across the floor, the artist evokes a sensation that renders present the emptiness of an invisible negative, something that is neither material nor form, upon the floorboards of a(n) (un)real stage. Bed (Piece of Sculpture) is closely connected to the Piece of Sculpture series, through which the artist has been actively experimenting with the form and concept of “sculpture” since 2023. The work originated from a simple sculptural desire: after becoming absorbed in the acts of cutting, assembling, and constructing metal sheets to create a form, the artist turned toward what remained behind—the cut-off fragments, the materials that had failed to participate in the formation of the final shape—and brought them back into the process of assembly and construction, ultimately allowing them, too, to become “sculpture.”
Embedded within the seemingly playful notion of a “piece” of “sculpture” is the sculptor’s own candid experience. As the artist explains: “This world contains fragments of the Perfect World I was working toward, the world I sought to create. There are cut and discarded pieces of metal, a theater that resembles a stage, elements from nature, and loosely woven hemp cords. Some are already made, while others remain only partially formed. Rather than constructing narratives or connections, I worked as though scattering components across a space.” (Excerpt from Siha Kim’s synopsis of Earth Theater) The Piece of Sculpture series can be understood as that “something” within the theater where unfinished fragments—fragments that have not yet become sculpture—continuously defer and suspend both “piece” and “sculpture” within the space between the two.
* Let us return to Bed (Piece of Sculpture). Like an enlarged template, the metal sheet, cut through with outlines of various shapes, lies on the floor, having already lost its original function. Perhaps Siha Kim sought to reveal those cut-out contours—those absences punctured like holes, so to speak. Yet these remnants lay bare, revealing the irony of the remaining torso, of the body as material substance. Neither material nor form, they present themselves simply as “remains”—as pieces of a sculpture. This “unfinished” material-form, its body pierced through and laid across the floor, traces a vast orbit from the position where sculpture and piece, positive and negative, face one another without ever fully meeting, repeating the visual alienation that runs through Earth Theater.
* “And yet, in this exhibition, I decided to create my own unfinished world, a world left incomplete by the pressure of trying to depart from my Perfect World, and by the anxiety and sense of lack that accompanied it. I chose to call that world Earth Theater —A theater that never rests.” (Excerpt from Siha Kim’s synopsis of Earth Theater) Moving between belief in and skepticism toward the three-dimensional reality of the world, Siha Kim repeatedly embraces, in their own words, error and suspension. In doing so, they contemplate a theater that never rests, a theater in which the world itself continually defers something, and through that very deferral makes the world perceptible to us.
That large, heavy metal plate—an absurd three-dimensional form moving between material and shape, object or sculpture—arrests a situation unfolding upon a stage where immense forces intersect. By suspending it in place, the artist evokes the tension of a silent theater, ultimately bringing into being the impossible time-space of the “stage” as the material manifestation of this mode of thought. In other words, constantly moving back and forth between pursuing and being pursued by the paradox of a powerful force that delays something and the persistence of that impossibility, the artist resembles a sculptor endlessly handling the negative space of reality that envelops both sculpture and piece, uncertain of what else to do.
* In Earth Theater, a microscopic perspective akin to a womb coexists with a macroscopic perspective that imagines the Earth within the vastness of the cosmos. At the same time, the interior of the body intersects with the immense external environment that surrounds it. Movement toward life and the weight of death are gathered together. Light and shadow repeat along the same orbit. The artist calls this sculptural moment—where two worlds come into contact—a stage, and that place a theater. In other words, it is a “piece of sculpture.”
Siha Kim’s work exists alongside reality: alongside real events, real spaces, real objects, and all living and dead things that inhabit the real world. For this reason, the work can at times appear either to mirror reality or to construct it like a work of fiction. Yet upon closer examination, as the artist notes, “Some things are already made, while others remain only partially formed. Rather than constructing narratives or connections, I worked as though scattering components across space.” In this sense, the artist is less a storyteller than someone who lays things out upon a stage. They arrange these elements as though casting them into place, while drawing attention to the stage itself—the theater—as a site through which one can trace the vast emptiness surrounding them and the invisible interiority they contain.
Through years of practice, Siha Kim has developed a distinctive sensitivity to spatial installation, using the full potential of sculptural installation to explore the relationships between material, form, and space. “I give form to the fragmented aspects of the Earth through a number of sculptural objects. One of them will take the shape of a dahlia bulb that condenses all of these elements, while another will resemble the forms of soil and grass, represented through pieces of wood. If the bulb comes to possess life, it will unfold its own story, and this new protagonist will be met with generous applause. If it simply dries out, however, we will begin to think about its existence and purpose. And then, perhaps, everyone will rush in to perform CPR on it. (laughs) In that way, my own psychological experiences—anxiety, a sense of lack, and so on—become shared by others. That is what I hope for.” (Excerpt from Siha Kim’s synopsis of Earth Theater) Here, sculpture becomes narrative, narrative becomes material, and form becomes space. In this continuous transformation, we catch a glimpse of the mind of an artist who sculpts, writes, and builds stages.
Soyeon Ahn (Art Critic)
Art critic Soyeon Ahn has explored image-based thinking through language by engaging in various forms of writing. Recently, she explored ways of practicing an artistic life through the language of criticism and writing, while experimenting with modes of critical collaboration as a form of creative practice. As part of her critical discourse activities, she conceived and organized Interview Project: Artists of Our Time (2021), and curated Jung Suyong Solo Exhibition: 1–2–3–4 (2024) to explore forms of collaboration between artistic production and criticism through the concept of sculpture. While experimenting with the media and formats of criticism, she published Letter and Paper (2024), a collection of critical essays created in collaboration with the independent publisher Hezuk Press, and also presented a solo exhibition of art criticism under the same title.
