KIM Hyojae: Parkour

KIM Hyojae, Parkour, 2021, single-channel video, color, sound, 33 min 21 sec. All rights reserved by the artist

KIM Hyojae focuses on the traces left by the body in real and virtual space, which are replicated and reproduced by random users and recontextualized in an ever-changing language. Parkour (2021), in which physical beings that exist in the real world are reduced to data and trace new identities, is a narrative about the gestures of repeatedly practiced movements. Like the performative act simultaneously moved from and to the past and the present in the physical environment as pursued by the first generation of parkour practitioners, this is rooted in a pioneering attitude as well as a flexible one toward repeated failures and an unpredictable future. At the same time, the way parkour is practiced, consumed and shared by today’s generation is mediated by digital devices and interfaces, and has come to be perceived as a type of sport. Consumed and circulated in a limited virtual space, perfectly reduced to a screen, parkour has been subsumed into a transnational space where time has become irrelevant and where the physical body can be reproduced as data. 

About the artist 

KIM Hyojae (b. 1993) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Korea, USA and France. Currently she works as a parkour researcher and practitioner, exploring ecologically sustainable society and creating augmented shoes as an ecopolitical method for future humanity to survive and transcend technology amid climate change.