Minouk Lim (born 1968 in Daejeon, Korea; lives and works in Seoul, Korea) engages with the very arteries of city life—the streets—to create her poignant commentaries on Korea’s rapid urban development. Her single-channel video Rolling Stock (2003) derives from photographed images in a brochure the artist was commissioned to create as a cultural guidebook for foreign audiences visiting the 3rd Gwangju Biennale. The images depict motorized vehicles and carriages on the move that are common fixtures of cities all over Korea. Her later video New Town Ghost (2005) assumes a more proactive stance, where Lim hired a young woman to stand astride the deck of a KIA motor truck as it cruised through the redevelopment area of Yeongdeungpo in Seoul, all the while rapping through a megaphone, to the beat of a drummer, a personal narrative attacking the neighborhood’s quick urban growth and the indifference of its residents toward it. Appointed as one of the “new towns” of the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s New Town Project, Yeongdeungpo is where the artist’s office and studio are located. Lim is known as an active community organizer who collaborates with different experimental groups through her Pidgin Collective, which she founded in 2003.
