HYUN KIM Performance & Open Studio

You are warmly invited to an afternoon of movement, art, and shared experience with Natanal Hyun Kim.

📅 Date: Friday, August 29, 2025
🕑 Time: 4:00 PM
📍 Venue: Monira Foundation Gallery, 2F #250, inside Mana Contemporary, Jersey City

This 20-minute performance grows out of Natanal’s long-term project 〈Eyesea〉, which began during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. At that time, he photographed people’s eyes—the only part of the face visible behind masks—and conducted interviews to capture their untold stories. Though our faces were hidden, we remained deeply connected through our gazes. That silent bond felt like the ocean: vast, invisible, yet profoundly shared.

The photographic archives and video installations from 〈Eyesea〉 became the foundation for this new performance. Here, the ocean is not only a metaphor but also a spatial and emotional framework—a place where past, present, and future coexist.

〈Momburim 2025〉 envisions an embodied ritual of collective transformation. By fusing traditional ceremony with contemporary urgency, it becomes a physical invocation of resilience, memory, and hope.

About the Artist: Natanal Hyun Kim (金顯)

Natanal comes from the Korean name Hyun Kim (金顯), where Hyun (顯) means “appearance” or “to appear.” He adopted this name after moving to the United States in 2015, using it as a way to honor and preserve his origins and identity.

Natanal is a movement-based artist exploring the shifting relationships between body, nature, and time-space. Rooted in the idea of the “human in motion,” his practice investigates how memory, physicality, and emotion shape connection and transformation. Through choreography, he brings into focus the forces of love, social structures, cultural identity, and human rights—not as abstractions but as deeply lived realities. His recent works span immersive performances, site-specific installations, and video-based choreography, moving fluidly beyond the stage to embrace interdisciplinary forms of expression.