K-ART FOCUS For Ru Kim, dog's escape becomes story of power

JEONNAM-GWANGJU SPECIAL METROPOLITAN CITY — Pink velvet curtains frame an empty stage. A soft, fluffy carpet lies beneath shifting spotlights. There are no performers in Ru Kim’s “Tails of Courage, or the Master’s Pirouette” (2026), but four-channel sound gives the space its cast: Courage, a pink dog who has escaped an oppressive master, the master, who crawls, barks and searches for the missing animal, and a restless light that seems to move with a will of its own.

As a voice fills the room, visitors are invited to picture the chase. The master, aching from crawling on knees, finally reaches for what seems to be Courage’s tail and races toward it— only to realize that the tail is growing from their own body.

The strange, tragicomic reversal is Kim’s new installation at “The Look is A Li(k)e,” the Italian Pavilion of the 16th Gwangju Biennale — where Kim was invited to join the Italian Pavilion together with another Korean artist. The artist turns narrative into a testing ground for hierarchy: who is allowed to command, who must obey and what becomes possible when fixed roles begin to break down.

“The main character is actually the lighting,” Kim said in an interview with The Korea Times. “It speaks, it moves, it changes color and follows you.” The work, designed with light designer Kimju Seul-kee, makes a usually secondary theatrical device into an agent with its own apparent intention.

The installation is part of the artist’s ongoing “Courage” project, which began with workshops involving university students in France and later Korea. Its central dog takes its name partly from the U.S. animated television series “Courage the Cowardly Dog,” while the project draws on playwright Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children.”

The project grew from Kim’s wish to speak about courage without reducing the solemn lesson or a simple assurance that everything will work out.

“The dog was not the starting point,” Kim said. “The starting point was the idea of wanting to talk about courage … I wanted to tell them that yes, things can happen, but you have to make them happen. And to do that, I think it really takes courage.”

In the project’s earlier chapters, Courage leaves the master and encounters other dogs. Together, they form a music group and recall the fearful days before their escape, finding a sense of freedom and kinship away from who had controlled them. The master, meanwhile, cannot accept the separation. Trying to get Courage back — and perhaps the authority — the master takes on the dog’s gestures and body.

For the artist, the value of the role reversal lies in making viewers feel their own attachment to familiar hierarchies. In previous live performance of the work, Kim descended from a statuesque, godlike stance to crawl through the audience on hands and knees. Some viewers laughed; others recoiled. One person even petted the artist.

“I think there are many ways to see a performance, and one of them is to feel connected to a character,” Kim said. “To see a character go through such a change and feel uncomfortable with one of the changes, it speaks to who you are feeling more related towards.”

Born in Hamburg in 1995, Kim lived in Korea, Cyprus, Germany, Canada and Brazil before studying art in France. Although the artist does not reduce the work to an autobiographical piece, the experience of entering new cultural systems, learning to belong and recognizing the limits of adaptation led to persistent questions about power: "What can power become and what can we make it become?"

Kim’s interest in unstable authority has also led to histories in which power is secured by treating some lives as less than human.

In the 2024 solo exhibition “I KNOW WHAT I’VE DONE,” Kim revisited a fifth-century legend about St. Julius, who was said to have traveled to an island in northern Italy, killed the snakes living there and built a church.

Rather than accepting the myth as told, Kim considered how colonial and religious narratives have repeatedly rendered people targeted for domination as animals, monsters or lesser beings.

Kim’s resulting work imagined a different encounter. The displaced saint came face to face with a snake he killed, and the two walked together through the island and church. They shed their costumes, changed into matching skin-toned outfits and danced through the night. The work does not offer a clean reconciliation; Kim leaves the relationship unresolved, even suggesting the possibility of the snake killing the saint.

“I like to take part of what have roots in history or social belief and try to imagine what could have been otherwise, or what could be otherwise,” Kim said.

Such counter-narratives also reflect Kim’s engagement with hydrofeminism, a strand of feminism thought that views water as a reminder of the material connection among human beings, other species and the environments they share.

“It helps us understand our position as humans and our responsibility towards different species but also within our own species because of this notion that we are undeniably all connected by waters we emit and ingest,” Kim said. “I think that sense of responsibility also makes us not only feel closer to each other and to the other but also understand that there is no true natural hierarchy that should be respected.”

“The Look is A Li(k)e” runs through Feb. 14, 2027, at Donggok Museum in Jeonnam-Gwangju Special Metropolitan City.