Born in Goyang, South Korea, in 1965, Kim Bumsu obtained a Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts at Hong-Ik University, Seoul, before moving to New York to earn a Masters in Fine Arts at the School of Visual Art in 1998. Now exhibited worldwide, Bumsu uses old and discarded Movie Film, cut up and re-arranged to create vast and complex collages that manipulate the light that passes through them from LED boxes behind. In doing so he means to stimulate the sentiment and nostalgia within the modern man, arousing compassion with, and romanticism of, what has disappeared into the past, expelled by the extreme finesse of digital culture and the continuous fluidity of the image world. By combining the dynamic flow of light with the static images in these films, we rediscover the vitality of film images.
Bumsu strives to bring together the generations of analogue and digital, reconstructing their relationship as a new, distinctive medium which has its own ways of expression, totally different from those of traditional painting, sculpture, and film. These works draw inspiration from the process of searching for 'Hidden Emotions', wherein Bumsu explores the concepts of time and space isolated within mass culture. This desire to draw out and experience hidden, natural emotions buried underneath modern techniques has been a central motivation to him. Transforming these 35mm, 16mm, 8mm films into a new kind of aesthetic language allows the artist a platform to discover and communicate with these hidden emotions.
By cutting, pasting and rearranging tapes, Bumsu edits his own emotion and imagination into his works, making use of the flatness and transparency of film, and commanding this new language.
