PRESS RELEASE

Two pigs and I, each weighs about the same. We eat roots and grains, food of the soil. We drink together.  We sleep together. We act with our instincts, nose to nose. I cannot read.  I cannot talk. I cannot leave the zoo box. After one hundred and four hours, perhaps we will see what it’s like to be a pig, and what it’s like to be a human. Perhaps the difference is blurred, mingling through skin on skin, in the mud where all ends and begins. - Miru Kim

Miru Kim was born in Stoneham, Massachusetts in 1981 and was raised in Seoul, South Korea. She attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. She received her BA in French and Romance Philology from Columbia University in 2003 and an MFA in Painting from the Pratt Institute in 2006. Solo exhibitions of Kim’s work have been held at the DOOSAN Gallery, Gestarc Gallery and The Cell Theatre in New York, the SODA Gallery in Istanbul and Gallery HYUNDAI Gangnam in Seoul. Group exhibitions including Kim have been held at the National Museum of Visual Art in Montevideo, the Coreana Museum of Art in Seoul, the Queens Museum of Art in New York and at SCOPE Basel/Miami (Waterhouse & Dodd Contemporary, London) and the 2010 Fokus Łódź Biennale in Łódź, Poland. Coverage of Kim’s work has appeared in the Financial Times Magazine, La Stampa, the Korea Herald, NY Arts Magazine, the New York Times Magazine and the New York Times. Kim was a subject at the 2008 EG Conference with TED.com. Kim is held in the permanent collections of the Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, the Embassy of the Republic of Korea in Montevideo, the Museum of the City of Łódź and the Fountainhead Residency in Miami.

Kim lives and works in New York. There’s no clean deREMOVEion of the works or artists, themselves. This is quite literal with Miru Kim’s performance piece of “I Like Pigs and Pigs Like Me”, as she comes into intimate, often dangerous, contact with a caged throng of live pigs. A self-professed hygiene freak, the performance becomes a catalyst and nightmare for the 30 year-old photographer, lauded and decried for photographs placing her naked body set against forgotten industrial and urban landscapes.

Opens December 1 - December 6, 2011
This performance includes nudity. Minors not accompanied by an adult will not be admitted. Viewer discretion is advised.


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Miru Kim is a New York-based artist and explorer.  Her first series, “Naked City Spleen” is based on her exploration of urban ruins such as abandoned subway stations, tunnels, sewers, catacombs, factories, hospitals, and shipyards. Her next series, “The Pig That Therefore I am” juxtaposes her skin against the pig’s skin in industrial hog farms to explore the changing relationship between humans and animals.  Her latest series, “The Camel’s Way” has followed her journey to deserts around the world, including the Arabian Desert, the Sahara in Mali, Morocco, and Egypt, the Thar in India, and the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, where she lived with desert nomads, slept in caves, and photographed herself with camels.  

Miru's work has been highlighted by countless international publications and online media, and is now in public collections including National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, Seoul Museum of Art, The Museum of Photography Seoul, Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Borusan Contemporary Turkey, Addison Gallery of American Art, and The Francis J Greenburger Collection 

Primary (Est. 2007) is a context and research-driven curatorial collective with an emphasis on public art. We thrive amongst the self-taught, working-class misfits, who explore the margins of a new Americana through pungent, human-focused narratives. Our program engages with the raw and uncanny, celebrating border voices, bootleg culture, and intergenerational commentary, connecting the new and unseen with broader audiences and evolving collections.

For further information, please contact info@thisisprimary.com