Hyeyeon Kim
We miss
January 14 - February 18, 2023

We miss, the first U.S. solo presentation of the work of Hyeyeon Kim included two videos and a reinterpretation of a past performance work. 
 
Room for Breathing Only is a video piece that depicts what appears to be a ritual performed by three women in a dimly lit room. For this work, the artist gathered her mother and grandmother in a room where they were given simple instructions to - without talking - communicate only through the tearing and crumpling of a single piece of blank paper. 

Family conversations never end elegantly. So, I put my family in a room where one can only breathe. It is a place where my mother’s text just ends at the first sentence, where everyone holds their breath and never speaks deeply. This space contains both the resignation that it would be better not to say anything if no one can understand each other, and the expectation that there might be a new possibility of dialogue in this unfamiliar language.

Take Care (2019) is a performance piece in which willing participants following instructions to board a train in Seoul, South Korea at a particular time and to look in a specific direction as the train leaves the station are greeted in the distance by the artist waving to them. For her show at Best Practice, Hyeyeon has reworked Take Care to happen periodically over the course of the exhibition and to be viewed online through an extensive municipal CCTV system installed throughout the metropolitan region of Seoul (refer to schedule with hyperlinks below). She will appear briefly during the opening reception.
 
For Backwards to the Future (2021), the artist stitched together a 14-minute long video narrative using only leftover and extraneous footage from several years of previous video projects. 

Without shooting anything new, I decided to create a work with only the footage I already had. Looking at the huge amount of trash that is waiting because there is no more space to dump it, it seems that mankind can now be sustained with what has already been made. Need to invent new ones? The same goes for artworks. Potential trash sleeping in the corners of computers, cell phones, and external hard drives? This time, I will call them potential works. 

Hyeyeon Kim is a video and performance artist. She is interested in the interaction of people and social norms that shape personal relationships. She received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 2012. She currently lives and works in Seoul.