ARTISTS
© Kandis Williams, courtesy the artist and Heidi
KANDIS WILLIAMS
A TRAVEL GUIDE: BLACK GOTHIC IN SOUTH KOREAN HORROR
2025
Video
51 min., 50 sec.
Kandis Williams’s work takes up critical theory around race, colonialism, necropolitics, and eroticism in order to interrogate representations of Blackness and the Black body across popular culture. Splicing together her own video footage and written notes with archival materials, A Travel Guide: Black Gothic in South Korean Horror addresses the enduring effects of US militarization in South Korea while examining the figure of the Black soldier in Korean visual culture and the echoes of Black performers in contemporary K-pop. Williams adds to this mix her reflections on Korean concepts of ghosts and ancestors, tracing how those concepts inform histories of state violence that resonate across the Korean Peninsula and the United States. Drawing out this shared grammar of haunting allows the artist to state convincingly that “Afro-Asia is not a corridor, but another dimension of relation.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kandis Williams was born in 1985 in Baltimore, Maryland, and lives between New York and Berlin. Spanning collage, video, performance, and writing, her meticulously researched practice foregrounds the body as a site of experience while interrogating representations of Blackness and the Black body across popular culture. She also runs Cassandra Press, founded in 2016. Williams has held solo exhibitions at institutions including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2025), and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond (2020). She was the cocurator of “The Great Camouflage” at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2025–26, with X Zhu-Nowell). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at institutions including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2025, 2023, 2020); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2025, 2022); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021). Williams was a participant in the 15th Gwangju Biennale (2024).