Kim, Mi Jin - Prof. of Hongik Graduate School of Art, Planning & Criticism
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APRIL 2014
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Kim, Woo Young currently resides in California. He is typically on the road as he photographs landscapes where he captures rudimentary aspects of our world that are overlooked. During his travels, he has found an interest in the recurring expired factory zones and towns abandoned by society, time, and people; which he describes to be the “remnants of capitalism and industrialization”. He draws connections and comparisons between such places, with his own past. Upon observation his works, it can be assumed that the sharp lines and distinguished tones that are expressed within Kim’s work, hint at environments that we are acquainted to. Kim notices particular places within moments of emptiness and quiet, which can be interpreted as either abandonment or paradoxically, as solace. He also has a fascination with the effect that light has on all of his subject matters. He perceives walls washed in light as canvases onto which naturally formed shadows are the medium. Sunlight breaks through the urban landscape, producing strong contrasts over spaces engulfed in shadows. In his daily life, he constantly observes his environments and interactions as subject matters of his work. Each selection has gone through a process of being analyzed and interpreted for an extended period of time, before being photographed. The camera simply acts as a tool to capture a place of meaning. He feels that he enters the camera’s eye and is absorbed into the time in which the composition of a subject is being made into something monumental through the isolation of specific colors, shapes, textures, and so on. Kim wants to capture the changing of colors within structures through the lapse of daylight. Tones that seemed to represent positivity and brightness alter into tones that may cause for the same color to be distinctly different to itself earlier the same day. It is because of this ritual of observation and Kim’s relationship with light, that such mundane subject matters have transcended into dignified and profound objects of interest. Tire tracks solidly engrained in hardened mud linger around the remnants of abandoned towns and factories. As the wind blows and Kim captures the moment, what was in reality, a moment, decades from the actual day of abandonment, appears to be a precise moment in time, immediately following the very last of those to vacate. Although Kim’s photographs are digitally captured, he does not alter the images to a far extent. Rather, he manipulates the beauty of what is, creating images that may seem to be two dimensional and abstracted configurations. Despite the solitude that Kim’s photographs may make us feel and though there is no trace of biological life, it is evident through the traces of wind and hints of bygone vivacity, which bring even more life to these photographs through the creation of nostalgia of a time past. Although the identity and relationship to places and subjects depicted are not in direct connection to us, there is a familiarity that can be felt through the longing of the fleeting.
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