Charles H. Traub_Chairman, M.F.A. Photography School of Visual Arts
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2003
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As I look Woo-Young Kim's creative images, I am aware of blend of an Eastern sensibility, a kind of anguish that is nevertheless lyrical - fleeting, blended with the strategies and currents of the post-modern Western artist who is self-conscious in his deliberate deconstruction of the imagery he has conceived. Woo-Young Kim's are elegant photographs, indeed, imaginative art!
They are disorienting in their space; they create an aura but don't exactly allow us to know what we have beheld. Perceptions of the real world fracture, and then are put back together in a seamless, smooth surface that becomes a new kind of object to be contemplated. It arrests me that these images, though abstracted, remind me of glimpses into some kind of real, though dreamlike, world. The imagery comes from some kind of private source in Woo-Young's imagination; yet, as viewer, I am able to extract from the image a specific for myself that gives these photographs a kind of universal presence. I look at them carefully, contemplate them awhile turn away to yet another, come back and something seems to have moved. I have a sense that each of these images is in a constant state of flux.
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