Full description from the venue
1-Pyeong Museum project at the Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art, Kim Su-min has long maintained a keen artistic inquiry into metadata embedded within maps. Having explored the multifaceted possibilities of visual perception—often by analyzing inaccessible topographies through cartographic frameworks—Kim investigates in this exhibition, Variations of Data, the visual divergence that unfolds between mechanical records aspiring to perfection and the ever-shifting reality of the natural world.
The core of this exhibition takes as its point of departure the gaze of the Landsat satellite, which traverses the Earth along a predetermined orbit and timetable every sixteen days to document the state of its surface. While the coordinates and metadata captured by the satellite appear to be objective and immutable information, they are, in reality, nothing more than static records, taxidermied by freezing the flow of time at a specific moment. Yet, when confronted with the actual ground, which ceaselessly reshapes itself without pause, an inevitable observational error emerges between this fixed data and the physical terrain.
In the single-channel video unfolding within the indoor space, the narrator repeatedly visits the physical sites of specific coordinates to contrast the discrepancy between satellite data and the actual topography. The stream rendered dry in the orbital view reveals running water on-site, or conversely, a newly carved watercourse meanders where the data anticipated none. The narrator dutifully logs this variance between the satellite data and the site as the error within the report. However, these anomalies do not denote falsehood or failure of either side. What was undeniably accurate on the day of orbital capture reveals a visual misalignment, caused by the structural inability of static human records to capture in real time the immense weight of time held by nature.
Across the screen, the satellite imagery undergoes a reductive transformation: colors and planar surfaces gradually strip away, leaving only sparse linear traces until the imagery sheds its primary function of topographical representation. Yet, this unraveling does not signal the absolute erasure of data, but rather a reconfiguration into something new. Liberated from the imperative to define the terrain, the data begins to obey alternative commands. Throughout this metamorphosis, the capture timestamps and geographic coordinates remain stubbornly intact—standing as enduring testimony to what has endured and what has drifted away.
The variation proposed in this exhibition refuses to frame the dissonance between data and nature as mere inaccuracy. Instead, it frames it as a dynamic interstice generated as the two move at different tempos. Just as the satellite lines on screen reconstitute themselves beyond functional servitude, this exhibition is a process that allows viewers to experience—through their own individual sensibilities—the diverse visual traces inscribed upon the land within the rift between cold numbers and hot reality.