Born to a family of shamans, Kim Sangdon is a spiritual practitioner and multidisciplinary artist whose practice investigates Korea’s past—in particular the violent division of the South and North—and its ruthless pursuit of modernization.

In his earlier works, the artist studied processions of people and non-human entities in traditional mourning rituals, political protest and communal gatherings of healing. Through installations and performances, he observed a collective malaise that the novelist Choi In-hun described as “refugee mentality,” referencing the rootlessness of people constantly escaping borders, whether geographical, historical, or socio-political. Yet in the ancient practice of shamanism, great emphasis is placed on ideas of boundary expansion and shape shifting. This idea—that spirituality can dissolve the violence of borders—forms the crux of Kim’s practice, giving birth to new, resilient, ways of being.

For his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, “The Eggs,” Kim Sangdon looks to the humble egg as a metaphor for spiritual growth. Small but endlessly generative, the egg appears throughout Korea’s sociopolitical history, from myths of kings being hatched to present-day protests, where egging politicians has become a common ritual.

The folkloric painting series, “Egg That Has Spent the Night” (2024–25), first shown at the 16th Sharjah Biennial in 2025, references Kim’s interpretation of “night” as celestial realms of the subconscious, dreams, and maternal gestation. Rising out of obsidian darkness are forms reminiscent of alien spawn, energy auras, or the hyper-connected signals glowing on our screens, painted in the traditional style of dancheong typically used to decorate temples and sacred buildings in Korea. Underneath, the rubbly textures of the black base layer reveal the artist’s relationship to grounding rituals. Working long nights in his studio, Kim would often break for a walk outdoors with his dog. The memory of looking at the night sky while traversing the quiet, empty streets gave him the impulse to layer his canvases with asphalt paint, binding the infinite stars to the glittered compositions of the road below.

These pluralistic connections—the divine and the earthly, the exquisite and the ordinary—reveals Kim’s belief that spiritual communion can be found in all places. Central to this idea is the ubiquitous symbol of the antenna, present in the router devices that sit in our homes, the tiny sensory organs of insects, or the ways in which our own bodies receive, or emit, signals. In the paintings, these antenna signals present themselves as overlapping, concentric circles, a mysterious fullness to the ovum shapes. In his sculptures, however, Kim counterbalances the celestial qualities of his paintings with more earthly revelations. On the heads and bottoms of surrealist, elongated eggs are dancheong-painted circles, suggesting that spiritual messages, and resilience, can be found even in the most ordinary of places, such as a supermarket aisle, or even the shelves inside of our fridges.