Mimae: the edge of sleep – Sooun Kim, RSA x Wasps 2024 Award Winner

Mimae: the edge of sleep explores an actuality of abstraction across layered realities, exposing aftershocks of sensation and dissonant emotion through metaphorical and physical planes. The 2024 exhibition is awarded to artist, Sooun Kim after being selected by Wasps’ Arts Programme Manager at the RSA Annual Show. Sooun is currently represented by Patricia Fleming Gallery.

In Mimae: the edge of sleep, Kim presents a new suite of paintings, through which he explores the mobility of consciousness, the misalignment of sensation, and the residue of emotion in the body. Beginning from a metaphorical place of psychological delay, the works embody the perceptual tremors and fissures that arise in the gaps between diasporic senses, physical location, and emotional attachment to place. From there, Kim translates those slipped layers of sensation into a distinct visual language.

“Mimae” is a Korean term created by the artist, implying the residual sensation between sleep and wakefulness, the lingering of emotion, and the overlapping of alternate layers of reality. These sensations are presented as a response to invisible dissonances such as the failure of emotional attunement, linguistic delay, and temporal gaps of the body that the artist experiences as a Korean immigrant. The “edge” is where the strata of these sensations unfold, and is not a boundary but an aftershock, transcending through metaphorical and physical planes. It is another secondary modality of reality, and ontologically, it is reality.

In Mimae, Kim layers painting and sculptural elements on cold metal surfaces. Arranging the fluidity of image, materiality, and emotion in multiple strata across the works. The recognisable traces of imagery and the fused masses of material coexist in an unfamiliar juxtaposition, constructing spatially condensed matrices of emotion. Within this pictorial plane, abstraction functions not as a residue of impression, but as embodied form — a sensorial concreteness of abstraction, where emotional sensation attains a presence of actuality.

Sooun Kim works across painting, video, sound, and installation. Embracing a process of abstraction shaped by mediated perception, his artwork appears as shifting terrains; hybrid surfaces where his lived experience of diasporic migration drifts in and out of proximity. Refusing romantic notions of cultural fusion, Kim’s work foregrounds how identities and images fragment and reconfigure under postcolonial and technological conditions, accentuating the psychological distance between simulation and human embodiment. Sooun Kim is represented by Patricia Fleming Gallery.

Solo exhibitions: Glasgow International (Upcoming); NADA, New York (2025), Bank Commissions, Outer Spaces, Glasgow, UK (2025); Echoes, Patricia Fleming Gallery, Glasgow, UK (2024); Ramifying Frost, Goethe-Institut, Glasgow, UK (2023). Two-person and group exhibitions include: 198th RSA Annual Exhibition, The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, UK (2024); Begin Again, the Korean Embassy Cultural Centre in London, and Berlin, UK and Germany (2022); Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin 2022, Berlin, Germany (2022); NOWNESS Experiments: Yellow Fever, NOWNESS ASIA, Hong Kong (2022); Art Lovers Movie Club: Born Beneath, ArtReview (2022); The Auto-Buzz of Hybrid Kim and Rabbit, Intermedia Gallery of Centre for Contemporary Art, CCA, Glasgow, UK (2021); CIRCA Class of 2020, Piccadilly Lights in Piccadilly Circus, London, UK (2020); Aesthetica Short Film Festival, York, UK (2020)