Abby Robinson _ photographer
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MARCH 2022
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A lot of time has passed since I wrote the text for Kim Woo Young’s first catalog. A lot of miles have been traveled and memories accrued since then too.
Happy to reacquaint myself with Woo Young’s work, I first went backward to re-examine the photographs that accompanied my text and then fast-forwarded to survey the images in Boulevard / Boulevard. This backward/forward push-pull seemed appropriate. I claimed early on that to understand his visual language, you had to talk/think in dualities: hard/soft, delicate/bold, sensual/intellectual, serene/disturbing, and, in the subtlest of ways, life/death. These dyads hadn’t so much changed as mutated; it was just that over time he’d become more masterful in juggling these concerns in ever more nuanced and unexpected ways.
What I understand now is that Woo Young’s career arc is propelled by restlessness, abrupt geographic shifts and daring. Since his identity and work are shaped by travel and dislocation, he revamps his practice by switching continents when he needs to shake things up. Big moves precipitate big ideas; long distances spur long-term projects. First, he left Korea to study photography in New York (which was where and how we met). Then, studies over, he reversed course to head back to Korea to launch a commercial career.
I caught up with Woo Young again in Seoul shortly after he’d opened his studio. Calling what we had dinner is something of a stretch - we shared a table at a restaurant, I ate, and Woo Young fielded call after call from clients. Of course he was a success, and of course he was beleaguered; his clients had no clue how hard he worked to make work look easy. In retrospect, it was amazing, though not surprising, that he kept his studio running as long as he did. But Woo Young approaches everything he does with intensity. Despairing that his artistic creativity was running on empty, he scrapped the studio, said goodbye to the draining commercial world, packed minimal gear, and left home, - this time, unlike the others, with no particular plan or destination.
Confusion would lead to evolution. National boundaries were artificial constraints. What seems so site specific morphs into the universal. This time, he’d let his interior journey mold and give heft to his exterior one. His modus operandi: hit the road while generously inviting us along for the ride.
Instinct and solitude eventually led him to the American west, new subject matter and a total 180° swerve into tonal vibrancy. In the resulting Boulevard/Boulevard work, a sensual eye-popping color POW! meshes with a nimble interplay of form. He uses color in a way that initially seems jubilant. But he is sly, and it is not; instead, he corrals color into a flipflopping, 2D-3D dialogue that rapidly gets complicated.
The pictures in his first catalog were earthy, somber, mournful and elegiac. Looking at the tonally dark images, you felt that he never saw the sun. The newer images seem sunny and initially read as cheerful until you realize he has created a world with absolutely no shadows. Without shadows, his precisely detailed structures-old, abandoned and end products of corrupting industrialization-don’t exist in any real time or volumetric space.
Though their subject matter is very different, his flat skies are a tweaked and contemporary homage to those Timothy O’Sullivan, another photographer who found his calling in the American West. Woo Young, never very interested in deep space, is instead concerned with sightlines, placement and stance. He is painstaking in figuring out where and when to best position himself and his camera. Through his craft and craftiness, we sense how important it is for him to stop, be patient, observe and literally and metaphorically find his footing. In the Boulevard/Boulevard series, he very carefully picks his spot so our gaze and attention doubles and mirrors his own.
While the temperature in the images is hot, their beauty torques toward a cool brittleness. This work has hard edges and harsh realities. We just about bump up against the picture plane. While there is no looking away, we are soon unmoored from the familiar, and yet we are now in a photographic space where we can all be observers and outsiders together. Woo Young’s compositions, made with pretty basic equipment, make room for us to experience quiet, curiosity, sorrow, open-ended contemplation and wonder.
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