Graduated from the Department of German Language and Literature at Korea University and Korea University Graduate School before pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Kim mainly studied the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, the philosophy and aesthetics of Adorno and Benjamin in particular, and studied late French structuralism including Roland Barthes. Kim had a long-standing intellectual interest in revealing and deconstructing the mythology of capitalist culture and life by reading aesthetic phenomena in various fields such as fiction, photography, and music with the help of different theories. Believing that the lack of a civic critical spirit is the root cause of all unjust powers in this era, Kim has written columns for newspapers and magazines such as Hankyoreh and Contemporary Poetics.
