Sang Woo Kim Reclaims the Gaze in 'The Seer, The Seen'
The artist takes back his image from the world that tried to define him.
Sang Woo Kim makes his solo debut in London with The Seer, The Seen, spanning both of Herald St’s locations. Through an evocative presentation of self-portraits and pigment transfer works, Kim confronts race, identity and individuality with unflinching honesty, exploring what it means to see and be seen.
Born in South Korea and raised in the UK, Kim’s work reflects the tension of navigating two worlds. His self-portraits are anchored by several sets of searching eyes—some meeting the viewer, others looking beyond. For Kim, reclaiming this gaze becomes an act of defiance, a way of untangling the threads of racism and fetishization that shaped his time in England. Methodological and, at times, obsessive, these works transform his image from a site of consumption into one of resistance, giving way to a powerful reckoning of self image and identity.
Having built a successful modeling career, Kim has spent years watching his face circulate under the control of others. Now, he reclaims it on his own terms. Gestural brushstrokes and tightly cropped compositions disrupt the notion of wholeness and escape consumer-driven capture. Elsewhere, his pigment transfer works, composed digitally mined and manipulated images, echo the merciless immediacy of the Instagram era, questioning the “truth” of photography and the artifice of representation.
The Seer, The Seen turns the mirror back on its audience, offering an opulent exploration of personhood while facing the struggles that define it. As Eugene Yiu Nam Cheng writes, “To frame an individual life as being particularly important or exceptional, without asking how that life is but a consequence of the world around it, would be to remove it from the experience of living.” Demanding reflection in a world that craves simplicity, the artist’s search for identity becomes a shared act of discovery.
The exhibition is now on view at Herald St and Museum St in London through February 1, 2025.
Herald St
2 Herald St,
London, E2 6JT
Museum St
43 Museum St,
London, WC1A 1LY
