Minouk Lim was born in 1968 in Daejeon, South Korea. Lim moved to Paris in 1988 and graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 1995. Before coming back to Korea, Lim was a founding member of General Genius, a collective of seven visual artists and graphic designers. Upon her return to Korea in 2004, Lim founded the Pidgin Collective to continue her inquiry and artistic practice on the issue of identity in the context of the relationship between the individual and the community within a society. Along with her practice as an artist, Lim also worked as an art director at the Haja Center (the Seoul Youth Factory for Alternative Culture) until 2007.
As an artist of many forms, Lim has been creating works that are beyond the boundary of different genres and media, deepening the scope of questions while encompassing writing, music, video, installation and performance as her means of artistic expression. Lim has been paying strong attention to the marginalization and the discrepancy generated during the process of rapid democratization and industrialization of South Korea, which also affected the lives of the many in the system of global economy. As such, Lim seeks to find ways to examine objects embedded with performativity, different methods of performance and imaginative modes of creating records. Such an inclusive approach embraces different fields of history, politics, philosophy and literature, drawing reflections on everyday life and challenging the routineness of life.
Among the numerous works created by Lim, New Town Ghost (2005), S.O.S.-Adoptive Dissensus (2009) and Portable Keeper (2009-present) are video pieces created out of performances held in non-institutional, transient sites. In the meantime, The Weight of Hands (2010) and the FireCliff series (2010-present) deliver moving images that are mediated through the lens of an infrared camera. Her recent work Navigation ID was invited to the 10th Gwangju Biennale as an opening performance and an installation in the exhibition.
Currently, Lim is preparing for upcoming solo exhibitions at Portikus, Frankfurt and PLATEAU, Seoul. Lim’s major solo exhibitions include presentations at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2012); Freer | Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. (2011); PKM Gallery, Seoul (2011); and Artsonje Center, Seoul (2008). Since 2010, starting at Madrid, Lim has been presenting a series of site-specific Performances FireCliff’, S.O.S-Adoptive Dissensus (2009) and Navigation ID (2014) that was presented at the 10th Gwangju Biennale as an opening work. Lim also participated in a number of group exhibitions and biennials including the Paris Triennale 2012, Liverpool Biennial (2010), Morality, Act IV: Remembering Humanity (Witte de With, 2010) and Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea (LACMA, 2009-2010).