Sooyoung Leam
Sooyoung Leam is an art historian and curator working between Seoul and London. Her recent collaborative, international curatorial projects include Actually, the Dead are not Dead (Seoul, Korea), Gwangju Biennale special exhibition Between the Seen and the Spoken (Gwangju, Korea), Shanghai Project (Shanghai, China). She studied History of Art at Cambridge University and completed her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, which examined the making and unmaking of sculpture in Contemporary Korean art through the works and writings of artist Lee Seung-taek. She is currently a member of the14th Gwangju Biennale curatorial team.
Connected Material
A conversation about KANG Sang-woo’s film KIM-GUN and how it treats historical evidence and testimonies as a ‘horizon of contingent truths’ with the potential to be pieced together in alternating ways, touching upon the complex dynamics of archives and life stories, collective memory and amnesia, the mechanisms of image-making and history-writing.
Beyond the objects in any given archive is a myriad of people, encounters and exchanges. The desire to locate the human element beneath archives is challenged by new technology. As part of ‘Life Stories and Archives’, we began a virtual ‘common archive’. Our collaborative thread addresses pertinent questions arising from shared interests in how individual’s origins, biases, networks and political struggles fuel the need to collect.