Shinwook Kim is an artist and researcher who traces beings and places that have been made invisible, from the Loch Ness monster to a rumoured treasure ship in the East Sea. He studied at Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art and holds a doctorate from the University of East London. His awards include the IL WOO Photography Award (2022) and the British Institution Award, Royal Academy of Arts (2013), and his work is held by the MMCA Government Art Bank, the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts and Oriel College, Oxford. He is represented by CE Contemporary, Milan, teaches at Kyungil University and publishes through ARP (Artist-Run Publishing).
Treasure Island: Haunting Specters — Photographing an Archipelago of Rumour
In the summer of 2018, a Korean company announced that it had located the wreck of the Dmitrii Donskoi, an armoured cruiser of the Imperial Russian Baltic Fleet scuttled off Ulleungdo Island at the close of the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905. The ship, the company claimed, was loaded with gold. A cryptocurrency was issued against that gold, share prices multiplied and collapsed, and the affair ended in a fraud investigation. Estimates of the treasure aboard ranged from five billion to one hundred and fifty trillion won — a spread of some thirty thousand to one.
Treasure Island: Haunting Specters (2022–24) begins with that rumour. Because the wreck lies four hundred metres down, beyond the reach of any light-based instrument, the project abandons the object and photographs instead the places where the rumour comes ashore: Ulleungdo, Busan, Gadeokdo, Jungjukdo, Chwido, Jisimdo, Jeju and, across the maritime border, Tsushima. What the camera finds at each landing point is not gold but fortification — gun batteries begun in the 1880s, tunnels dug by conscripted labour in the 1940s — and, on Jeju, the sites of the killings of 1948–49.
This presentation proposes the archipelago as a method rather than a geography. Read from the land, these events separate into competing national narratives; read from the sea, they form one continuous surface along which currents, cables, capital and rumour travel without regard for borders. Drawing on Derrida’s hauntology and on the transnational circulation of the Yamashita treasure legend, the talk asks what a deliberately flat, documentary photography can do with histories that are contested, dispersed and largely underwater.