Sang Woo Kim

Sang Woo Kim’s practice addresses the tensions that lie between image and perception through the lens of cultural duality. Having moved from South Korea to the United Kingdom at a young age, the artist dissects his fractured identity and confronts the alienating factors that have affected him from youth.

Kim’s tightly cropped oil paintings present close-ups of his own face, challenging traditional forms of selfportraiture. The artist approaches this series with a desire to recover agency over his racialisation as a Korean man in British society. By focusing on his eyes, the paintings become, in his words, a ‘quiet protest’, reclaiming the facial feature that was once a target of discrimination by the Western gaze. Drawing on his experience as a professional model, Kim reasserts ownership over his body and image which was captured, disseminated, and commercialised in his career. He questions the fashion industry’s acceleration and considers the rate at which photographs are taken, exploring the drift between subject and object that unfolds in the process.

Alongside the self-portraits, Kim’s pigment dye transfers further his reflections on image circulation and consumption. This series comprises photographs mined from online forums and phone snaps, which are transferred onto canvas after being digitally manipulated. The artist experiments with the codes of photography, marking out a distance between representation and reproduction. Deliberate slippages in his mechanical process as well as considered preparations of the surface with varying degrees of viscosity result in an uncannily painterly aesthetic. Capturing a contemporary subjectivity defined by immediacy and constant stimulation, the linear arrangement of the multi-panelled works recall the forms and repetition of social media doomscrolling.

In May 2026, a solo presentation of Kim’s work featured in Aura, a major group exhibition at the new AMA VENEZIA foundation in Venice, which opened in tandem with the Biennale.