“How has your historical research been going since 2022, when Russia attacked several targets in Ukraine?”, Iden Sungyoung Kim asks me. We had both started to focus on the 1960s, on nuclear testing, Cold War international relations and their brutal consequences, at around the same time. In 2018, our interest seemed to belong to a hazy past. But I recall the perceived historical distance collapsing with the increasing militarization of the present – and it continues to do so.
The testing of an extremely powerful hydrogen bomb in 2016 as part of North Korea’s nuclear rearmament caused a contemporary Sputnik shock. This was the starting point for Iden Sungyoung Kim’s artistic research into this thematic complex. “The international press was alarmed”, she says in her new work Lunch? I Said LAUNCH (2026). Her South Korean friends and family shrugged their shoulders over reports of these renewed experiments by their “very strange neighbour”.
An intimate relationship to everyday violence and its linguistic forms pervades Iden Sungyoung Kim’s work. How do people deal with violence beyond human comprehension? What are adequate words or emotions? In Lunch? I Said LAUNCH, the artist examines the tortuous complex of history, politics, the contemporary moment and pop culture humorously, weaving together autobiographical experience and commemorative sequences in the genre of a comedy show. Based on the use in South Korean slang of the word “nuclear” for “very much”, “ultra” or “brutal” – as in “Nuclear Spicy Chicken” instant soup – she shows how memory reshapes, expands and takes wild twists and turns in consumerist culture and collective memory.
“I ate an egg in Fukushima!”, Iden Sungyoung Kim tells me in her studio, fascinated by the simultaneity of normalcy and exception that enabled her to undertake a kind of publicity tour to Fukushima. A carefully curated image for an organized group. Kept out of the picture was Japan’s imperial past and its alliance with National Socialist Germany during the Second World War.
This journey was the starting point for the performance Hypocenter 1945–2025 (2025). In this work, a person in a hazmat suit and gas mask distributes liquids. Unruffled movements convey an impression of precision. But this is deceptive. The boundaries between interior and exterior, between maximum control and deliberate loss of control, are blurred. The liquids are drinks, whose layered texture brings to mind the heatwaves of an atomic explosion and whose names – “Manhattan” and “B52” – refer to the US nuclear bomb research project and the long-range bomber also used in the Vietnam War. They are extra strong. Here, Iden Sungyoung Kim subtly stages the delayed visceral effects of toxins. Memory and the possibilities of forgetting go hand in hand. Feelings are sometimes enhanced, sometimes numbed.
Traces of the performer’s presence remain in the space: a table with glasses, candles, bottles and the hazmat suit and gas mask. A video is playing in the background. The sea glitters in the red light of the setting sun, with only occasional clouds drifting past. Ambient sounds create a soothing atmosphere. Footage of a mushroom cloud forms a second visual level, then swiftly disappears. Aestheticization or dramatization? The all-too familiar vision of an atomic cloud rising on the horizon only appears as an image, but the beats convey a sense of urge. The slowed-down image of the cloud evokes mixed feelings of sublimity and dread.
Iden Sungyoung Kim’s aesthetic practices examine the emotional, linguistic, physical, cultural and quotidian traces of nuclear violence, then and now, and actualize them for a present undeterred by its own past of deterrence.
Text: Jandra Böttger