"How are you doing with your historical research since 2022, when Russia launched military attacks on several targets in Ukraine?" asks Iden Sungyoung Kim. We had started, in a similar period, to engage with the 1960s, the atomic tests, the international entanglements of the Cold War and their brutal consequences. Our interest seemed in 2018 still to belong to a dusty past. I remember that with the increasing militarization of the present, the felt distance to history increasingly collapsed – and it still does.
For Iden Sungyoung Kim, North Korea's nuclear rearmament, which in 2016 triggered a present-day Sputnik shock with the testing of an extremely potent hydrogen bomb, stood at the beginning of her artistic research into this complex of themes. "The international press was alarmed," she says in her current work Lunch? I Said LAUNCH (2026). Her South Korean friends and family shrugged when reports came in about the renewed experiments of their "very strange neighbor."