Unsoo Kim_Curator, Kukje Gallery
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2001
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Since Kim Woo Young’s last show in a gallery space, we have seen his work all over the place, sometimes without knowing it. He has produced a wide range of different images for numerous fashion catalogues, advertising brochures, a movie poster and music CD covers.
His creative endeavors include collaborating with artists, fashion designers, graphic artists, fashion designers, architects, filmmakers, journalists, and corporations to create new images to stimulate the senses of the sight and mind. Now, he is in the darkroom again, this time in preparation of another solo show in a gallery space. The new body of work presented is a series comprised of photographic images in color prints joined with silk-screened images on acrylic. Kim has used the conventional Surrealist devices of incongruity to produce a work that is visually compelling and complex. By joining the two incongruous images, Kim has used the conventional Surrealist devices of incongruity to produce a work that is visually compelling and complex. By joining the two incongruous images, Kim has created a photographic object that verges on abstraction and fantasy, in his efforts to extend visual experience beyond that based on a single image taken from one position and one point in time and them exhibited or reproduced as an emblem of reality.
In discussing Kim Woo Young’s previous work in an exhibition catalogue, a critic wrote that in order to understand his photographs one must think in dualities. He is drawn to seemingly banal objects, objects that are not hard to find and can be easily acquired by anyone. But once he has acquired them each object takes on a special and personal meaning. However ordinary and unimportant the details may be, they are magnified and given most profound meaning. His images make use of a dynamic set of associations, among which are the relations between man and nature, the artificiality of culture and essence of nature. When he conceived of his newest work, he began to think about the trajectory of his work from his first one-person show. With his background in urban planning, he began his photography career by creating urban landscapes, capturing the changing face of the city in a contemplative manner. That is to say he neither criticized the altered nature nor glorified the process development. For his second one-person show at the Visual Arts Gallery in New York, he began to think about experimenting with different techniques, to push the limits of the photographic medium. He showed a body of work all in color and taken in the rain that produced an effect of layered color adding depth to the print surface. The visual imagery of earth, grass, rocks and trees was transformed with different methods and techniques for the final image. When he showed at the East West Gallery in New York for his 4th one-person exhibition, his images of nature were magnified and printed like hanging scrolls of the Eastern tradition. He was primarily concerned with changing how photographs are viewed by enlarging its scale.
The prints measured 6~7 meters high and were hung like scrolls with the bottom edge rolling naturally onto the floor of the gallery space. Again, he was experimenting with various techniques, such as collage and drawing on the prints with a mixture of charcoal and lacquer. By incorporating fluid materials into the rigid framework of a photograph, the images gain a dynamic quality.
The presentation of Kim Woo Young’s recent work is in many ways a continuation of his exploration of dualities that exist in all facets of life. During the span of four years since he had one-person exhibition there have been several shifts to Kim’s visualization of the theme, nature. The most obvious change being the format of the work, which is now encased in its own acrylic frame and acts more like sculptural objects containing photographic images that are installed across the wall. Kim has experimented with transferring his abstract images of nature onto clear acrylic panels by employing the silk-screening method. The acrylic panel is the same size as the photograph and overlaps the printed image in the form of a box. With these combined images he creates an almost surreal image; a familiar object is made strange. The fragmented and reconstituted “realities” visible on magazine pages and billboards have served consciously or otherwise as a pattern book of possibilities! For Kim who uses it to project his private vision, to deal with the possibility that perhaps “the mind knows more than the eye and camera can see.”
The subject of his visual discovery resonates a strong feeling of empathy because he is attracted to casual objects that lie around, things that go unnoticed and are taken for granted until we feel a sense of longing in their absence. The glossy and synthetic images show the influence of commercial advertising world in which he plays an active part, as well as his own aesthetic sensibility manifested in his previous work. This new body of work is evidence of the photographer’s continuous push towards finding his own visual vocabulary unhindered by the categorization of art and commercial photography.
Then has he, in fact made a great leave from his previous work? We are certainly witnessing a transitional moment in his development as an artist. His attitude in discovery of the subject is the same, whether he is capturing images to be presented in a gallery exhibition or for a fashion catalogue. Perhaps no one feels this change more clearly than the artist himself who has freed himself from the distinction between fine art photography and commercial photography. The divided realm is rendered meaningless, and finally we can put this argument to rest.
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