Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Laura Hyunjhee Kim. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Laura Hyunjhee, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

I believe the most meaningful project I am working on is revealing the vulnerable process of “life-ing.” Whether intended for public viewing or as an intimate action, every aspect of life I perform interweaves into each other. Sensing through the myriads of known and unknown felt experiences, I frame and reframe ongoing dialogues with myself, other humans, nonhumans, and more than humans. In a way, my artworks have provided me with the language and agency to situate my place in the world. Therefore, I approach each realization as a living and breathing word, sentence, and paragraph in the making, curiously contributing to a larger narrative yet to be revealed.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a Korean-American multimedia artist who lives and works in the company of neighboring squirrels, wild rabbits, and songbirds of Richardson, Texas. Through solo and collaborative work, my projects are driven by performance thinking and making articulated through a wide range of media, including video art, performance art, participatory performance, performance installation, digital art, new media art, and writing.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

A few years ago, I had to relearn being in my body. As challenging as it was, the process of unlearning what I considered to be “normal” reshaped my worldview. This experience of reintegration and healing widened my perceptions, and I made friends with the enigmatic, often (un)nameable, embodied sensations of (dis)comfort—I now consider this a mysterious superpower of mine. I have so many thanks to give, but I’ll save that story for another time.

Ever since, I have been fascinated by moments that reorient our relationship with the living, the dying, and every blurry beyond as humans. In a way, I am interested in learning from ways of knowing that can possibly reach beyond human understanding. Conceptual exercises for reconfiguration may include standing slightly slanted and askew, double-take blinking for reality checking, inter-blobbing into belonging, and not taking anything for granted.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

My answer to this question changes, shifts, and moves with the times. At this particular moment on a Tuesday at 11:11 am CST, I think my role and responsibility as an artist and storyteller is to create evocative projects that have the potential to bring about a strong sense of interconnectedness and deep belonging.

An integral part of my creative process is listening to (other)worldly pulses and opening to a sensorial rhythm and circular flow. When I deepen my relationship with the world around me, a vibrant portal opens and humbles my presence, widens my senses to be in conversation with stories that have always been there and existed many-many years before me. Perhaps I have always been driven by this anticipation for hidden stories to reveal themselves from the unknown—break dormancy, emerge, speak, and echo through what I love doing the most.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.lauraonsale.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lauraonsale/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauraonsale
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lauraonsale

Image Credits
http://www.lauraonsale.com/blink
Inter-blobbing Towards the Love of Missing Out (Performance with Surabhi Saraf, Centre for Emotional Materiality, The Ammerman Center Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology, Connecticut College, 2023), Close Encounters (Video Projection Mapping, Night Lights Denver & Denver Digerati, 2022), Traveling 2046 (Video, Sound by Chris Corrente, 2022), BLINK (Video with Chris Corrente, 2023)