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Sunday 16 February

Kim Sun Woo: The Prophet of the Dancing Dodo

Published on: 14 January 2025

By: Hervé Lancelin

Category: Art review

Reading time: 4 minutes

Kim Sun Woo (김선우) transforms the dodo, the extinct bird of Mauritius, into a striking mirror of our modern condition. Through his vibrant canvases, his atypical creatures become heralds of a possible freedom.

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. Kim Sun Woo (김선우), born in 1988 in Seoul, is not your conventional Korean artist obsessed with technology and futurism. No, this guy chose to paint a bird that has been extinct for over three centuries—the dodo of Mauritius. But don’t be mistaken: his paintings are not just an ecological lament about the sixth mass extinction.

Kim’s genius lies in his ability to turn this clumsy bird into a ruthless mirror of our contemporary condition. As Theodor Adorno might have said, we have become “administered” beings, shaped by industrial society to the point of losing our capacity to imagine other possibilities. Kim’s dodo, with its atrophied wings and perplexed gaze, is us: creatures who have willingly traded their freedom for the comfort of a gilded cage. Walter Benjamin spoke of the loss of aura in the age of technical reproduction—Kim shows us the loss of our wings in the era of late capitalism.

Take his work “A Sunday on La Mauritius”. The composition recalls Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”, but instead of Parisian bourgeois in their Sunday best, we see dodos dancing, dreaming, and stargazing. It’s a biting critique of our collective inability to see beyond the social rituals we mechanically repeat. As Herbert Marcuse wrote in One-Dimensional Man, we have become incapable of imagining an existence different from the one imposed by the system.

The lush jungles Kim paints in the background are not mere exotic settings. They function as what Gaston Bachelard called “poetic spaces”—places where imagination can unfold freely, escaping the constraints of technical rationality. In his more recent works, like “Paradise” (2022), tropical vegetation literally takes over the pictorial space, creating what Deleuze and Guattari would call a “rhizome”—a horizontal network of possibilities that opposes the hierarchical verticality of our societies.

Kim’s painting technique, using saturated colors and meticulously applying acrylic gouache in multiple layers, is not just about aesthetics. It’s a form of resistance to the generalized acceleration of our era, what Hartmut Rosa calls “social desynchronization”. Each painting requires more than five layers of paint, a laborious process that stands in direct opposition to the logic of digital instantaneity.

The way Kim portrays his dodos, often gazing at stars or holding torches, evokes what Ernst Bloch called the “principle of hope”—that fundamental human ability to imagine a different future, even in the most desperate circumstances. His birds are not resigned to their extinction; they actively seek to reclaim their ability to fly, even if it means using balloons or makeshift planes. It’s a powerful metaphor for what Jacques Rancière calls “emancipation”—the oppressed reclaiming their destiny.

The very choice of the dodo as a central subject reveals a sophisticated understanding of what Giorgio Agamben terms “the contemporary”—the ability to grasp one’s epoch by taking a step back from it. By resurrecting an extinct species to critique our present, Kim practices what Walter Benjamin called “rescue”—a form of redemption through the reactivation of the past.

But don’t be mistaken: despite the critical weight of his work, Kim is not a prophet of doom. His compositions are infused with an almost childlike joy, a lightness reminiscent of what Nietzsche called the “gay science”. His dodos dance, play, explore—they embody what Herbert Marcuse called the “Great Refusal”, the ability to say no to the established order while affirming the possibility of a different life.

Kim’s philanthropic commitment, notably his €100,000 donation to the WWF, is not just a gesture of corporate charity. It’s a concrete manifestation of what Peter Sloterdijk calls “anthropotechnics”—the need to develop new practices to transform our relationship with the world. By linking his commercial success to biodiversity conservation, Kim shows that another model is possible.

Kim’s collaborations with brands like Bulgari or Starbucks might seem contradictory to his critical message. But as Roland Barthes might have noted, these commercial appropriations of his work function as contemporary “mythologies”, revealing the contradictions of our system while subverting them from within. His dodos, reproduced on luxury bags or coffee mugs, infiltrate daily life as double agents of imagination.

Kim’s popularity among collectors in their twenties and thirties is no accident. He speaks directly to a generation that, as theorized by Mark Fisher, lives in a “capitalist realism” where it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. His dreamy dodos are figures of resistance for those who refuse to resign themselves to a preformatted future.

Kim’s daily ritual of painting from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. is not just about personal discipline. It’s a form of what Michel Foucault called “care of the self”—a practice of freedom through mastery of one’s time and body. In a world obsessed with flexibility and constant availability, maintaining a steady rhythm becomes an act of resistance.

Reference(s)

KIM Sun Woo (1988)
First name: Sun Woo
Last name: KIM
Other name(s):

  • 김선우 (Korean)

Gender: Male
Nationalitie(s):

  • Korea, Republic of

Age: 37 years old (2025)

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