A CHAIR FOR CO-RESPONDING

8.2 Bon Kim. WATER LIGHT LAB Brixen 2023. Photo Studio Bettina Pelz, Jennifer Braun (12)_1993x2000

8.1. Bon Kim. WATER LIGHT LAB Brixen 2023. Photo Studio Bettina Pelz, Jennifer Braun (9)_2000x1997

“But, thirdly, I am also, as a living being, a site of heat as well as both poles of its exchanges: it is a question, therefore, of vitality, of which Comte quietly announces that living being is, by essence, a phenomenon of heat. The three announced blows are well echoed: the inert, the living, their laborious relationship. One finds a unitary world, from the day when one finds the fire.”

– Michel Serres, Hermès IV. La distribution

“a chair for co-responding” begins with a question on the correlation between a human as a living creature and another thing which shares same time and space. Each seemingly an independent creature, participants are constantly influencing each other for “living” just by being there.

This project was an attempt to make an interactive relational situation between the audience who is invited to the exhibition space and the weeds, which we can easily find on the street and they are always there somewhere. When an audience sits on a chair, the audience’s body temperature, which is generated as a result of constant giving and receiving, also an evidence of living activities, permeates the chair. The Peltier used to make the chair is a temperature difference generator, based on Seebeck effect, in which electrons move to the cold direction between the audience’s body temperature and the chair made of cold material, and this electron’s movement generates electricity.

The generated electricity turns the light with specific lightwaves to amplify photosynthesis, which illuminates moss installed in the exhibition space. The amount of oxygen generated by moss is produced by light in the dark space, increases and returns to the audience sitting there and other audiences sharing the space.

By sitting on the chair that generates electricity with participant’s body heat, the audience is naturally able to become a part of the art work. The electricity made of human body temperature is used to turn on LEDs which amplifies the photosynthesis of plants and it accelerates the plant to produce more oxygen.

By just being there, the participant could be in a situation where the human affects the plant and be affected by the plant at the same time.

The project uses the temperature difference between the audience’s body heat and the local room temperature to generate electricity to power the work. Due to various factors such as weather and temperature conditions in the exhibition hall, the clothing worn by the audience, and the number of people participating in the exhibit, it is not always possible to fully power the piece with human body heat alone. In this case, the work currently on display at Brixen Neustift is occasionally supplemented with external power.

Bon Kim is based in Seoul and Germany, graduated fine art, sculpture at Kyung-Hee University in Seoul, and is currently in Master program in digital media at Hochschule für Künste Bremen in Germany. She has worked as assistant for several exhibition for other artists, Yoon-chul Kim Studio and Kimchi & Chips Studio have supported a number of projects and exhibitions, including Gyre, Venice Biennale, Korean Pavilion (2022) and Another Moon (2022). Based on learning from this experience, Bon Kim is currently working on her art works and cooperating with young artists in Bremen.

Bon Kim has worked with body based on fine art and sculptural language. Currently, She uses subtle body movement and phenomenon a medium to experiment the co-relationships between human-nonhuman-things that share the same time and space. 

In the previous work, “Breathing Casting Project (2019-)”, she tried to hold breath, which is a vital life activity and a temporal phenomenon of body, into tangible, sculptural form. In the project, “A chair for co-responding (2022)”, she tried to make a co-responding relationship between the audience-plant-chair by a chair which generates electricity from the audience’s body temperature and the electricity is used to turn a light on for the plain from local area, which amplify photosynthesis of the plant.The project was sponsored by a German HEC company in 2022 and was also selected by the German government’s invited scholarship DAAD STIBET in 2022.

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photos by: Jisan Lee, Boeun Kim, Dasom Kim