Art Sonje Center presents Muyeong Kim: Pig  from August 28 to October 4, 2026. Held in the Art Hall on the museum’s B1 level, the exhibition marks Kim’s first solo museum presentation and his first exhibition staged in a theater space. Interested in the histories and mechanisms of the theatrical, Kim shifts his attention from the theater as a conceptual subject to the theater as an actual site. The exhibition brings together new photographs made on Sorok Island, a black-and-white photographic series taken at Seodaemun Prison History Hall during its renovation, and new sculptures. The black-and-white photographic series revisits the hand-coloring techniques of early photography, developed in an attempt to reproduce the colors of reality, from a contemporary perspective.

The exhibition title, Pig, refers to the counterweights used backstage to support stage machinery. Essential to the operation of a performance yet hidden from the audience’s view, these weights take their name from pig iron^[1]. For Kim, they draw attention to the theatrical apparatus that makes performance—and illusion in its conventional sense—possible, while also revealing the material and historical conditions on which it depends.

Designed for audiences seated before a single stage, the theater directs attention from a fixed point of view. Kim transforms this theater into an exhibition space, revealing the conditions embedded within it: its stage, sightlines, and backstage systems. For Kim, the Art Hall’s planned renovation became an important condition in the development of the project, bringing into focus the possibility that parts of the aging theater might be removed. Responding to this state of uncertainty, he developed the exhibition around the theater as a space marked by transition, memory, and potential loss. Through the movement and multiple perspectives of its viewers, the Art Hall emerges as a site where accumulated histories and the concealed mechanisms that have long sustained theatrical production come into view.

^[1]  Pig iron refers to crude iron cast by pouring molten iron into molds. The name comes from a traditional casting arrangement in which a central channel with branching ingots resembled a sow nursing piglets. In theater, counterweights made of pig iron came to be known simply as “pigs,” a term that remains in use backstage.

About the Artist
Muyeong Kim (b.1995)
Muyeong Kim examines how different, often conflicting ideas and desires take form within space. Working with devices such as stages, cameras, and walls, he considers the construction of images alongside the ways bodies are positioned, exposed, or restrained within them. In his recent work, Kim has incorporated the construction and testing of stage mechanisms into his practice, exploring the subtle tension between the aestheticization of pain and a chosen form of passivity. He has held solo exhibitions at No.9 Cork Street (2024, London), Amado Art Space (2024, Seoul), and Museumhead (2021, Seoul). His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at Galerie Chantal Crousel (2026, Paris), Art Sonje Center (2026, Seoul), SONGEUN (2025, Seoul), and the Leeum Museum of Art (2024, Seoul). Additionally, he was an artist-in-residence at Art Explora Paris in 2025 and received the 1st Amado Art Prize in 2024.