Sol Kim works across video, performance, photography, and installation, probing the gaps between lived experience and the linguistic, cultural, and technological systems that shape it. Poking the limits of plant taxonomy, the art world ecosystem, racial boundaries, and more, Kim creates simple, often performative gestures through which meaning slips out of the rigid rules and categories and transforms into something unexpected. As these gestures twist and misuse systems, the resulting failure, absurdity, and absence recur as generative conditions that open up alternative ways of seeing and navigating the world. Amplifying subtexts beneath the smooth surface of everyday life, Kim’s work plays out different forms of agency that continuously negotiate and redefine themselves within the silent pressure of existing structures.
In recent work, Kim focuses on artificial intelligence as a site where systems of perception and classification alienate actual objects. While AI promises accuracy and efficiency, its operations remain opaque, bringing persistent tensions between what is detected and what is overlooked. Tinkering with the black-box nature of the technologies, Kim explores how existence is flattened, destabilized, and reconstructed within algorithmic processes. The edge cases Kim introduces allow machines to drift beyond their intended purpose, sifting through fragments of existence that fall outside normative datasets. Capturing moments when machines trained on human histories deviate from human decision-making, Kim’s work questions how oscillation between machine vision and human activity might reconfigure their coexistence. Kim earned a BA in English Language and Literature and a BFA in Painting from Seoul National University and received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania.
This work was included in Under Scores, the 2026 Weitzman Fine Arts MFA Thesis Exhibition.
