We are pleased to present the following lecture and screening as part of the lecture series for the Studio Project course “Design in Japan” at the Graduate School of Design.
Lecture
Date & Time: Wednesday, April 15th, 2026, 14:50-16:20
Venue: Workshop Room (Building 7, 1st floor), Ohashi Campus of Kyushu University
Language: English
Target Audience: Students and the general public
Screening
Date & Time: April 14th to 18th *Tue-Fri, 9-21h, Sat 10-17h
Venue: Visual＆Audio Lounge, Design Library, Ohashi Campus, Kyushu University
Minouk Lim is an internationally acclaimed visual artist and one of the most prominent artists of her generation in South Korea. Her practice spans a wide range of media, including sculpture, installation, video, performance, and music, often combining several of these elements within a single work. On a broader level, Lim’s art reflects on our relationship with the societies and historical moments we inhabit, addressing themes such as alienation and the fragmentation of communities, as well as loss and trauma as consequences of modernization and far-reaching historical and urban transformations, both in her home country of South Korea and beyond.
In this lecture, Lim will present and discuss a selection of her projects, speak about what motivates her to work as a visual artist, and share her personal path to becoming one.
Two of Minouk Lim’s videos are presented in the Video & Audio Lounge (April 14–18):
The Weight of Hands (2010, color, sound, 13:50 min) documents a collective performance initiated by Lim at construction sites on the outskirts of Seoul during Korea’s Four Major Rivers Restoration Project (2009–2012). As part of a large-scale transformation of the country’s industrialized river systems, these areas were strictly off-limits to activists and critical groups. Filmed with an infrared camera, the video conveys a strangely detached and otherworldly atmosphere.
Night Shift is a song from the 1978 singing play The Lights of the Factory by Korean folk singer, composer, and theatre director Kim Min-gi. Reflecting the harsh working conditions of factory laborers in 1970s Korea, the album was banned at the time but circulated widely on cassette tapes across university campuses and in factories. In Lim’s video Night Shift (2021, color, sound, 9:22 min), she interweaves footage of a new recording session of the song by the band Inalchi, led by musician Jang Young-gyu, with footage from the original production’s opening sequence and mask dance choreography, alongside newly shot material—probing the power of the song and ritual in the present.
Over the years, Lim has also realized several projects in Japan, for example on Ogi Island as part of the Setouchi Triennale (2016) and at the Aichi Triennale (2019). Most recently, she received the Obayashi Foundation Visions of the City Research Program grant, which resulted in a 2024 exhibition in Tokyo combined with a performative action in the form of a boat tour along the Sumida River and Tokyo Bay.
Minouk Lim’s solo exhibitions include Hyper Yellow (Ilmin Museum of Art, 2025; Komagome SOKO, 2024), Fossil of High Noon (Tina Kim gallery, 2022), Night Shift, 2021 Title Match: Minouk Lim vs. Young-gyu Jang (two-person exhibition, Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, 2021), Minouk Lim: The Promise of If (PLATEAU, Samsung Museum of Art, 2015). Lim has participated in a number of group exhibitions and biennials, including DMZ Exhibition: Checkpoint (2023), Real DMZ Project: Negotiating Borders (2021), Gwangju Biennial (2021 and 2014), Asia Society Triennial (2020), Setouchi Triennale (2016), Sydney and Taipei Biennial (2016), Paris Triennale (2012), Liverpool Biennial (2010), Political Populism (Kunsthalle Wien 2015), The Time of Others (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2015) and Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea (Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2009–2010).