[Gallery Walk] An Era Where the Real Must Prove Itself... Kim Heecheon's Moles Dig Beneath the Screen

Seo-Seoul Museum of Art hosts "Kim Heecheon: The Moles"
Over 120 works including games, videos, and photographs
Debut of generative AI piece "Malrin" and auto-play game "Lemon"
After the screen becomes reality, one question remains:
"Where am I?"

A white bird stands by the water's edge. It looks like a typical scene from a nature documentary. Yet someone asks: Can you prove that this footage was truly shot with a camera?

Heecheon Kim, "Lemon," 2026. This is an autoplay game that begins with the story of a mole named Butter who believes that Lemon is a being like himself and takes Lemon underground to care for him. Through the repeated cycle of Lemon being created and decaying away, the game questions existence and extinction in a world created by technology. Supported and provided by the Seoul Museum of Art.

In "Malrin," the new work by Kim Heecheon (age 37), a nature documentary director named Chanjong receives a strange request from a mysterious investigator. He must prove that a certain video is not AI-generated but has actually been filmed. The even stranger twist is that "Malrin," the very piece telling this story, is itself a 4-channel video created using generative AI. It goes a step further than making the fake look real: now, it is the real thing that bears the burden of proof.

Stepping into the underground gallery of the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art in Geumcheon-gu, Seoul, visitors enter this inverted world displayed across large screens. "Kim Heecheon: The Moles," which opened on August 20, is Kim’s first large-scale solo exhibition and the first media artist exhibition since the museum's opening in March. Since 2023, Kim has added new works "Lemon," "Malrin," and the photograph series ".dng" to his game and video art, presenting over 120 pieces in total.

Kim Heecheon's inquiry was not always about artificial intelligence. In his first video work, "Babel" (2015), he wrote, "The world has become a screen." It reflected a time when GPS, maps, cameras, and data were seen as ways to transfer reality into the digital. Over time, his interests have subtly shifted. In past interviews, Kim explained that, rather than existing separately, technology is increasingly disappearing into reality itself. For an artist for whom drawing a line between the screen and reality was once crucial, that very distinction has now become elusive.

That is why the games in the exhibition are so peculiar. They are games, yet nobody plays them. "Cutter3" and "Double Forger" are auto-play games created with the Unity game engine. Characters walk, converse, and incidents unfold before the audience, but there is no joystick. Even without our choices, the system operates, and the narrative continues. The long-held assumption that the player is the master of the game quietly crumbles.

Installation view of "Kim Heecheon: The Moles" exhibition featuring the new 4-channel video work "Malin" (2026) created using generative artificial intelligence (AI). It questions how to discern the 'real' in an era where the boundaries between actual filmed images and AI-generated images have become blurred. Photo by Dongung Lee · Courtesy of Seo-Seoul Museum of Art

This is where the mole appears. The protagonist of the new work "Lemon" is named Butter. It began with the whimsical idea that the mole, previously hidden as an Easter egg in the two earlier games, actually burrowed secret tunnels between them. Butter believes a fallen lemon is like itself and takes it underground. But the lemon rots. To meet another lemon, Butter digs further, carves out water channels, and tends to trees. Within the game, lemons are endlessly born and disappear.

The premise is charming and comical, but thinking of the exhibition’s title gives the moles a different resonance. Algorithms record what we see and click on the screen, relentlessly. The mole moves beneath that surface. It digs its own tunnels between the two worlds devised by the system. The museum describes the mole as a symbol of the wish to break free from technological environments and a being that shakes the fixation on a singular self. But there is no need to overcomplicate it: in a world where every road is mapped, the mole ventures where there are no paths.

The quietest space in the exhibition, unexpectedly, is the long corridor hung with photographs. ".dng" features 124 images Kim selected from the 5,841 pictures he shot with his mobile phone since 2023. Dead animals, insects clinging to plants, the backs of passersby, and reflections of Kim and his friends—a catalogue of small photos lines both walls. After passing through giant game screens and AI images, these mundane smartphone photos suddenly feel unfamiliar.

Heecheon Kim, "Marlin," 2026. A 35-minute, 4-channel video work created based on generative AI. Through the story of a nature documentary director being asked to prove that a video is not an AI-generated work but actual footage, it questions the "real and fake" of images. Produced and supported by the Seoul Museum of Art.

But the work’s title, ".dng," is itself a trap. DNG is the file extension for "digital negatives." Just because the artist captured these everyday moments himself, it doesn’t mean they revert to some unmediated "pure reality." Even before picking up a camera, we are already accustomed to selecting, saving, zooming, or discarding the world via screens. Between AI-generated images and smartphone photos, the exhibition is not ultimately asking which is the real one. Its question is whether the very sense of the real that we feel has already been manufactured by technology.

The exhibition is not particularly user-friendly. For visitors meeting the recurring characters and settings from "Cutter3," "Double Forger," and "Lemon" for the first time, it can feel like reading a game manual after having started to play. With long videos like the 35-minute "Malrin," following the storylines of every piece can soon become exhausting. Yet, paradoxically, that’s when the exhibition becomes most interesting: the experience of lingering within a system we do not fully understand. This, after all, is not so different from how we live with smartphones and algorithms, either.

An exhibition view of "Heecheon Kim: The Moles" held at the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art. Heecheon Kim's media works, including an auto-play game created with a game engine, can be experienced on a large screen. Photo by Dongwoong Lee, Seoul Museum of Art

In a 2023 interview, Kim Heecheon warned of the pitfalls artists face when working with technology; it is seductive enough that one might mistakenly believe technology alone makes art. What makes "The Moles" compelling is not how skillfully it deploys advanced technologies. AI and game engines, after all, are just tools. When such tools become so natural they disappear from view, Kim’s interest lies in how to find the human within them.

Perhaps that is also why the mole is needed. It neither smashes the screen nor makes a dramatic escape from the system. It simply digs downward, creating a little tunnel to somewhere else.

It has been eleven years since Kim wrote, "The world has become a screen." Now, the screen is so close it is barely perceptible as a screen at all. The question that lingers most from "The Moles" is not about the future of technology, but this: "Then where am I, as I look at this screen now?"

The exhibition runs until November 8 at the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art in Seoul. Admission is free.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.