Artist statement

Kim Sung Soo embodies a narrative emerging from loss through the construction and joining of metal, and focuses on the realization of playful 

fantasy through steel quilting and bolting techniques. In particular, he records a narrative of ‘coexistence’ reconstructed by overlapping an individual’s lost 

memories with the present. Kim Sung Soo uses images of animals, fairy tales, amusement parks, and dioramas that have influenced his work, and presents 

them in the form of large-scale installations, media, and drawings, focusing on sculpture.

The Story of Nothing

“All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.” As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry says, the innocence of childhood is a core value in life that everyone is forever missing, which represents our most innocent mind as human beings that brightens like a shiny diamond. Fairy tales are not just for children but sometimes they also give adults a time to reminisce about lost dreams and fantasy.

Since I was a child, I have always longed for the fantasy world from fairy tales. As I was somewhat inactive but preferred reading books and imagining, the world in fairly tales was like an exit from the reality to a different world where I can make my own playground and dream, which became my valuable daily routine. As a grown up, I still read children’s stories but now I feel something different from the wide imaginary world that I had felt before. The rational way of thinking that I have developed while living in this complex modern society makes me doubt the relations between story characters or the feasibility of the plot. I keep asking questions like “Why is that?” and try to tell the story in a logical way. Then, fairy tales become the preserve of children only and are just The Story of Nothing to grown-ups. Just as a bird with a broken wing cannot fly, the way of thinking of people who cannot dream is becoming more limited in fixed forms.

The Story of Nothing is a title that I gave to my own fairly tale when I was ten years old. The story has quite a ridiculous plot where characters from different stories co-exist in the same story. The thoughts that I had at that time started from an imagination with questions like “Why can’t the girl in Little Red Hood be friends with the wolf?” to a ridiculous story that I made up where the Puss in Boots, who dethroned a king to take the power, shows up in the same story with The Town Musician of Bremen who run a circus to entertain people.

Dreaming itself can be a starting point for any action. I wish people could find a small seed of meaningful dreams that exist in all stories, even though they look like nothing.

Kim Sung Soo