Guest Room:
Sunyoung Kim & Shinwook Kim

Guest Room is a format that fosters collaboration and sparks creative exchange. For this edition we welcome Hanmi Museum's Senior Curator Sunyoung Kim and artist Shinwook Kim, who reflect on the theme "Hyperobjects: Archipelagic Memories."

"Coined by the British philosopher Timothy Morton, hyperobject describes phenomena so vast and distributed across time and space that they exceed direct human perception. Imperialism, Cold War geopolitics, capitalism, climate crisis, and contemporary data infrastructures are among the hyperobjects shaping present-day life. Though often intangible, these systems permeate everyday existence, structuring political realities, social relations, and collective memory.

We approach photography as another kind of hyperobject. Photography no longer merely records reality; it operates as an inescapable visual environment that conditions how reality is perceived, sensed, believed and ultimately structured. Within this visual field, contemporary subjects continuously imagine and construct identity, desire, trauma and history.

This Guest Room focuses on photographic practices that examine how images circulate across digital and material networks, fragmenting, reshaping, and reproducing personal and collective histories. We approach these fragmented histories as an archipelagic condition shaped by war, division, developmentalism, geopolitical violence, migration, and unresolved Cold War realities. Though often no longer directly visible, these structures continue to haunt the present.

Photography operates here as a secondary hyperobject; a system that renders historical traces perceptible while simultaneously shaping how the relationship between past and present is sensed and understood. The archipelagic memories reconstructed through images persist like ghosts, continually circulating through contemporary visual culture and unsettling the present."