Heige Kim

My multidisciplinary installations are tangible and conceptual investigations into everyday materials and remnants of life that have been discarded in a forgotten landscape of waste sinks. Through artistic transformation and drawing upon scholars and artists across disciplines, I reframe accumulating waste, explore the role of art in social and environmental change, and demonstrate the role of artistic practice in forming new relations.

Everything we make ends up somewhere on earth or in the atmosphere. This includes not only manufactured objects but also chemicals, fertilizer salts, airborne dust, and pesticide residues. Once raw materials are amalgamated to become a thing, like a plastic bottle, they exist in this new form until the object breaks down and transforms into another state, such as microplastics, and incorporates with other elements, like water, soil, air, and us. Likewise, agricultural chemicals transform and migrate from fields to drains to rivers to air to lungs. Following my waste stream revealed the scale difference between personal debris and industrial infrastructural waste. In my practice, I explore the intersection of ecology and art through immersive installations that include video, sound, and ephemeral assemblages. In doing so, I  illuminate how we might better understand human-altered landscapes, such as the Salton Sea, a site of intense agricultural run-off pollution that turns into airborne particulates from the exposed playa. Understanding these physical transformations has become a conceptual and material framework in my practice.

While making videos and creating a visual narrative representing various landscapes, I apply Trinh T. Minha's concept of "speaking nearby" from a position of "not speaking on their behalf." In my experimental videos, this means leaving space for heuristic interpretation without explanation and giving space for subjects to be. I ask what happens if an object seemingly unrelated to the represented landscape is placed nearby. What occurs when debris from my life is placed next to the moving images of a landscape seemingly untethered to my life? How can these contrasts, from objects to moving images, form with and inform each other? What meaning is created in their juxapositioning? Using the strategies of assemblage, including time-based media, materials are placed "nearby" each other to address the entangled history and meaning behind everyday objects and our relationship to these more-than-human materials. I use materials like dust, site-specific trash, and personal debris to allude to how we are connected to the invisible landscapes that support our lives.

I am also drawn to plastic debris because I see plastics as agents and vehicles of human intention. "Thrown away" is merely a figure of speech. Instead, once discarded, plastics are relocated and displaced. They become entangled with other materials to transform into something else, very slowly, beyond our lifetime—plastics are omnipresent and nearly eternal. These human-made objects, these human-made materials, were never distinct from nature to begin with. I use DIY strategies to combine elements that generate a sense of quotidian intimacy and point to a larger social context. I use scavenged materials from my life, and nearby moving images of the Salton Sea, to draw relations of different scales of environmental impact, tracing the footprints of colonialism along networks often obfuscated from view.

These meditations on plastic debris were a catalyst for deeper reflections on world making and place making. My practice is grounded in paying close attention to place, in the lived and material experiences that emerge through walking, observing, and gathering. As someone shaped by Korean diasporic history and ongoing movement between places, I work through questions of belonging by attending to the land itself—its textures, and its intertwined human and non-human histories. My installations and videos use debris, field recordings, underwater cameras, and environmental sensors to trouble the boundary between what is visible and what persists beneath the surface. These tools help me trace how ecologies continue to hold memory and possibility.

In my recent work at the Salton Sea and beyond, I have been developing methods that blend sensory ethnography, material experimentation, and technological mediation. I am interested in how machines—microphones, underwater recorders, particulate sensors, or scientific instruments—shape what we can perceive, and how art can reveal the limits and biases of these devices rather than simply illustrating their outputs. Collaboration is central to this approach. My previous work with geochemists showed me how translating data into visual and sonic form opens generative tensions between ways of knowing. I continue expanding this technical image studies approach by working with scientists, engineers, farmers, and other artists to explore how different sensing technologies can act as mediators between human and more-than-human environments.

CV

Hee Jin Kim - heigekimstudio[@]gmail.com