Shin Hye Kyung _ Artist
/
JULY 2023
/
It has been about 30 years since I wrote about Kim Woo Yeong’s early works. He was remembered as a free-spirited soul in his early 30s, constantly transcending space and time, crossing between Korea and the United States, and constructing his own space-time without rest. Like a chameleon, the artist seemed to change his identity by disguising himself as a traveler, adventurer, or explorer to find his true self, as if he devoted his entire life to collecting the pieces of his own puzzle.
Collector of space and time
Even for his previous works, he was a sensitive artist collecting personal spaces. He focused on his “punctum” (a concept introduced by Roland Barthes in his book ‘Camera Lucida’) in the desert, the sea, and the corners of abandoned industrial cities, creating his own details, colors, textures, and compositions. Punctum refers to a subjective and personal element of a photograph to produce or convey a meaning unique to the individual viewer by evoking emotional resonance. Arising from details unintended by the photographer, the punctum effect transforms his photographs into very personal stories that accounts for emotion and subjectivity.
The artist chooses his own frame where an individual’s private moments and personal emotions associated with a specific place come together, questioning the complex psychological system of human curiosity, loneliness, desire, and death, and exploring the new relationship between landscapes and humans, especially the paradox of existence and the essence of being human, embarking on a journey to find answers to a question of his own identity. The landscapes captured during his travels are not empty but reveal a conceptual and concrete image with personal history and stories. The landscape in front of his eyes is completed like a piece of puzzle that the artist is looking for, losing its essence.
Photographers are usually collectors. Traces, memories, and recollections, all of which are fragments of space-time, are fossilized the very moment they are photographed, being collected by the artist’s subjective eye, losing the nature of universal landscapes. Usually, collectors gather and cherish things they like, rare or valuable things, treating their collection like trophies. Photographs can replicate and collect not only objects and people but also situations and emotions.
The replicability of photographs replaces material ownership, and the objectlike characteristics of photographs fulfill the collector’s desire for possession. However, what Kim Woo Young collects is not rare or valuable objects but space-time as representations of emotion. As it may seem irrational to collect peculiar events without objects, like in a movie where people pay money to collect strange events, collecting space-time also seems impossible. However, when we stand in front of his works, we can see his stories and traces that have been meticulously collected more than anything else. Unlike conventional collectors, he is building his own collection on an adventurous journey to explore the inner self and solitude in the vast and rugged deserts of the United States.
Nomadic Spirit, Residing in the Desert
As the vast desert landscape begins to emerge in the dim light of dawn, the artist ventures into the desert, seeking the light he desires. In the hazy morning light, under the intense vertical sunlight at noon, or even in front of the red-orange sunset glow over the western horizon, the artist waits for the desert to reveal itself. Like Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “The Decisive Moment” the photographer is looking for the right time to capture that moment, holding his breath.
The decisive moment in photography is the time when all elements come together to capture the essence and meaning of a specific scene. To capture this moment, the artist attentively observes, predicts, and swiftly reacts. Known for avoiding excessive manipulation and emphasizing naturalness, the artist captures the desert with a single standard lens as an integrated entity. This not only encompasses the lines, shapes, forms, and compositional aspects typically associated with landscape photography but also captures the unique emotions, stories, and context of fleeting moments. Sometimes, using a bird’s eye view or a perspective foreshortening, or compressing into a planar landscape, the artist’s camera captures objects to embody a sense of freedom and fluidity. As a result, his photographs of motionless desert landscapes become dynamic and complete with intentional asymmetry, conveying tension and emotion in decisive landscapes.
In terms of form, deserts may seem monotonous compared to cities or forests. However, the artist devotes himself to visual expression of unique light and colors of the desert, exploring the diverse spectrum of light that photography can express. These light and colors emphasize the primal and rugged nature of the desert reminiscent of primitive landscapes with sand dunes and rocky grounds. His desert series are saturated with beige and Fauvist shades while the contrasting combination of green, purple, and white effectively expresses the wilderness of the primitive desert, creating a harmonious blend of complementary colors that renders the desert even more mysterious.
The desert is a vast and harsh land, yet within it lies remarkable vitality and potential. With its primal essence, the desert forms a unique ecosystem where various species adapt and thrive under extreme conditions. It is natural that the artist, who has long explored the origin of life for his works, chooses the desert as his subject.
During his studies in New York, the artist wandered, searching for his identity. Spending over 15 hours a day wrestling with photography in the school’s darkroom, he worked until the darkroom became as comforting as a mother’s womb. The artist confessed that he felt a sense of existence in the floating image by associating the chemical solution used in photography with the amniotic fluid that protect a growing life.
Even in the process of photographic printing, the artist connects the joy of creation with life force. Life force is a central theme in his works. To the artist, the primal nature of the desert serves as a refuge of tranquility, a land of enlightenment that teaches patience, and a place of spiritual comfort and rest. Traveling in the desert is a journey of freedom and self-discovery to artist Kim Woo Young, driven by curiosity about the unknown.
Multiplicity of Landscapes
Kim Woo Young’s work is not only driven by the universal intention of reproducing landscapes to convey reality but also filled with a sensitive variation of multiple emotional lines. His work represents a special landscape where irrational and subconscious emotions coincidentally converge, exhibiting strength and fragility together, with life and death intertwined. His photographs seem to speak of a journey of leaving home to find a home, subtly throwing personal stories onto a neutral perspective resembling typological photographs. The touch of his shutter button exudes a sense of urgency from an unknown breath, while the tranquility of everyday life is comforted by solitude and silence. The artist transforms the dualistic structure filled with overlapping emotions such as certainty and uncertainty, familiarity and unfamiliarity, the visible and the invisible in his works.
Furthermore, Kim Woo Young’s photographs are delicate and sensitive despite their overwhelming sizes and the tremendous amount of work involved. It is because of the subtle and intriguing placement of minute details such as colors, lines, and textures that could easily go unnoticed in the vast photographs. His photographs reveal duality from various perspectives, harmonizing grand masculine forms with delicate feminine sensibilities, obsession about enduring vitality with premonitions of death. The free and dynamic Western-style formalism coexists with meditative and tranquil Eastern elements. In that sense, it is no coincidence that Kim Woo Young has completed both the North American Industrial City series and the Korean Hanok series together.
Rather than simply expressing the formal beauty of landscapes as commonly perceived, Kim Woo Young tells the “stories” of objects. He selects landscapes that encapsulate the traces of life, death, and personal emotions, conveying his own narrative through overlapping emotions. His desert series is his personal story that unfolds in an ambiguous and dreamlike space with diverse emotions. His works focus on the delicate sensibilities through a multiplicity of screens where abstraction and concreteness, light and materiality coexist, inviting us to venture into the fascinating landscapes of the desert. I want to visit his desert.
-