Kim JongHyuk

About the Exhibition

Beyond Boundaries is the seventh edition of the Chase Project, presented inside the former Chase Bank building at a moment of profound transition. The building is no longer functioning as a bank, yet it has not fully become a museum. Exposed ceilings, unfinished walls, traces of demolition, and remnants of its former use remain visible throughout the space. Kim JongHyuk enters this in-between condition not as something to conceal, but as the very material of the exhibition.

In Sea the Wall, Kim extends painted lines, fields of color, and sculptural elements directly across walls and columns, allowing the work to move beyond the conventional limits of the canvas. Architecture becomes part of the composition. The wall is no longer a neutral background for art, but an active surface through which the work expands, connects, and transforms. Existing cracks, scars, and structural interruptions are absorbed into the visual language of the installation, blurring the boundaries between painting, sculpture, architecture, and site.

The title Beyond Boundaries speaks not only to Kim’s artistic practice, but also to the transformation of the building itself. A space once devoted to the storage and exchange of capital is gradually becoming a place for the exchange of art, ideas, and experience. Rather than waiting for the museum to be completed before art enters, Kim’s work becomes part of the transformation itself.

Beyond Boundaries captures a temporary but significant moment: the point at which one identity has begun to disappear and another has not yet fully formed. Through Kim’s intervention, the former bank becomes neither simply a remnant of the past nor a finished vision of the future, but a space where both can exist at once.

Installation Views

Works

Artist

Kim JongHyuk

Kim JongHyuk (aka Rokkan Kim, b. 1991) is a Korean contemporary artist working across painting, digital collage, media art, and installation. Drawing heavily from the social and visual culture of the 1960s and 1970s, Kim combines historical imagery, architecture, cinema, fashion, and personal memory to construct surreal environments in which past and present coexist. Rather than treating history as fixed, he approaches it as something continuously reconstructed through individual experience and contemporary perception.

A central concern in Kim’s practice is duality—beauty and fear, progress and destruction, isolation and aspiration. In his Space Oddity series, the heroic image of the astronaut is contrasted with solitude and the psychological vastness of space, while Sea the Wall examines the complex relationship between the ocean, architecture, and human intervention. More recent paintings extend these concerns through architectural structures, concrete, layered surfaces, and fields of color, allowing physical material and digital imagery to exist within the same visual language.

Kim is significant for transforming the visual archive of modern history into an open-ended contemporary narrative. His work does not present a single interpretation of an event or image; instead, it reveals how the same history can contain opposing meanings depending on who is looking at it. By moving fluidly between digital media, painting, architecture, and installation, Kim creates a practice in which cultural memory is continually dismantled and reconstructed—asking viewers to reconsider the boundaries between past and present, reality and fiction, nature and the built environment.