Lunch? I Said LAUNCH!

Iden Sungyoung Kim explores the complex interplay of history, politics, the present, and pop culture through performance, video, and installation work engaging with nuclear violence and memory. About How have you been doing with your historical research since 2022, when Russia launched military attacks on several targets in Ukraine? Iden Sungyoung Kim asks me. We had started around the same time, exploring the 1960s, the nuclear tests, the international entanglements of the Cold War, and their brutal consequences. Back in 2018, our interest seemed to belong to a dusty past. I remember that with the increasing militarization of the present, the perceived distance to history gradually collapsed—and it still does. For Iden Sungyoung Kim, North Korea's nuclear rearmament, which triggered a contemporary Sputnik shock in 2016 with the testing of an extremely potent hydrogen bomb, marked the beginning of her artistic research on this complex of issues. "The international press was alarmed," Kim explains in her recent work Lunch? I Said LAUNCH (2026). Her South Korean friends and family shrugged when the renewed experiments of their "very strange neighbor" were reported. The intimate relationship to everyday violence and its linguistic forms, a recurring theme in Iden Sungyoung Kim's work, becomes evident. How do people cope with this violence beyond human scale? What words, what emotions are appropriate? In her most recent work, Lunch? I said LAUNCH (2026), Kim humorously explores the complex interplay of history, politics, the present, and pop culture. Within the genre of a comedy show, she weaves autobiographical experiences with sequences related to the politics of memory. Using the South Korean instant soup called Nuclear Spicy Chicken Ramen Soup as a starting point, she demonstrates how memory is reshaped, expanded, and takes bizarre turns in consumer culture and collective memory. "I ate an egg in Fukushima," Iden Sungyoung Kim tells me in her studio, seemingly repeatedly fascinated by the simultaneity of normality and exception, history and present, which enabled her to undertake a kind of promotional trip to Fukushima. Within this framework, a carefully curated image was presented to an organized group. Not included in the image is Japan's imperial past and its alliance with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. This trip was the starting point for the performative work Hypocenter 1945–2025 (2025). In the performance, a person in a hazmat suit and gas mask distributes something liquid. Calm movements convey an impression of precision. But this impression is deceptive. The boundaries between inside and outside, between maximum control and provoked, manufactured loss of control, blur. The substances involved are drinks, Manhattans, and B-52s, whose layers evoke the embers of an atomic explosion and whose name refers to the Boeing B-52 long-range bomber used in the Vietnam War—and they are extra strong. Iden Sungyoung Kim subtly stages the delayed visceral consequences after a body has been exposed to toxins. Processes of remembering and the possibilities of forgetting go hand in hand. Sometimes the feelings are intensified, sometimes numbed. Traces of her presence remain in the room: a table with glasses, candles, and bottles, and the hazmat suit with gas mask. A video plays in the background. The sea glitters in the red of the setting sun; only occasionally do clouds seem to drift in front of the camera. Ambient sounds create a calming atmosphere. Footage of a mushroom cloud forms on a second video layer before quickly disappearing again. Aestheticization or dramatization? The oft-seen mushroom cloud rising into the sky is shown only as an image, but the beats intensify the effect. The slowed-down pace of the mushroom cloud evokes mixed feelings of awe and horror. Iden Sungyoung Kim's aesthetic practices explore the various linguistic, physical, cultural, and everyday traces of nuclear violence between history and the present, updating these memories for a present that is not deterred by its own deterrent past. Text: Jandra Böttger Read more Toggle Performance / Live Art Mixed media Film / Video