An experimenter with language and an erudite author of stories with a
political charge and a touch of fantasy, Sung Hwan Kim arrived at visual
art after training in architecture and mathematics. His works combine
elements of biography and science-fiction influences, folk tales and
collective memories, creating metaphors for historical and social issues.
The work on display, Love before Bond, is a fairy tale about people who
have never met; it refers to the potential of a story to conceal or reveal the
connections between individual and historical events. Previously
dedicating himself to the lives of writers who have translated their
experiences of integration or alienation in the field of poetry and
music, through his own experience with displacement, Kim tackles identity or
cultural otherness by using explicit references to African-American
literature, notably of James Baldwin; and to William Shakespeare or Franz
Schubert. The film Love before Bond, stemmed from Kim’s interest in
his millennial niece’s adolescent angst. "As a Korean-American female, my
niece tries to find herself in an existing narrative of the marginalised. 
This, presently in the USA, is the narrative of people of colour, which,
for a teenager, is as alien as anything else - so it is for a young man
of colour." The columns are a rendition of the Pleasure Pavilion (1964) by
Philip Johnson, whose aesthetic path offsets Baldwin’s even though they
both lived in New York City at the height of the American Civil Rights
Movement. Giving form to "parallel narratives", stories that grow out of
real history, Kim reveals the relationship of individuals with their own
era.