k-art in Munich
Enter the belly of Munich’s digital beast with Younsik Kim.
After his undergraduate studies in Korea, Younsik Kim sought the raw vitality of the European art scene, eventually finding himself in Munich under the tutelage of Alexandra Bircken. Though the city hurled new and exotic dimensions of creative inquiry at him daily, it was within the shared tables of the PS61 residency and later the Domagkatelier studio complex that Younsik established a sense of community, slowed the pace, and ultimately reclaimed his footing.
Younsik developed an interest in Munich’s rapid transformation into a hub for digital infrastructure, zoning into the data centers and AI server facilities cropping up in the Tucherpark IT district. During a collaboration with curator Dominik Bais for the Various Others (2026) exhibition, he stood amongst these lifeless venues and felt a deep sadness begin to rise. He once viewed the digital cloud as an ethereal, weightless utopia, but in reality, it was a cold, brutal, and distinctly physical fortress of steel and silicon that devoured planetary energy simply to sustain its own abstraction.
It was on this site that Younsik confronted what he refers to as the physical death of sculpture in modern technological society. In an age where three-dimensional reality is flattened, reproduced, and consumed at an alarming rate, solid matter has become obsolete. To rescue his craft from artificial amnesia, he staged an intervention. Utilizing his expertise in mechanical engineering, he combined industrial materials and kinetic technologies to embed sculptures directly into the belly of Munich’s digital beast.
By locating the weight, resistance, and mobility of solid matter within the servers themselves, Younsik’s installations operated as pacemakers for an ailing medium. They returned visitors to pre-datafied point in their timeline, to a point when they were the admirers and pioneers of a unique sculptural language that has now been left for dead.
