Dr. Vivian Sheng in The Department of Fine Art, The University of Hong Kong
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AUGUST 2019
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For his first solo exhibition held in Hong Kong at Soluna Fine Art, Kim Woo Young presents a selection of recent works taken in the U.S. and Korea. Kim is always drawn to urban landscape. The majority of his photographs feature uninhabited buildings, houses, streets or industrial sites, conveying an unsettling sense of alienation and dilapidation that undermines people’s identification with places and cities they may have resided, encountered or seen somewhere. As an artist who is usually ‘on the road’, Kim’s photographs reveal his itineraries of travel across multiple urban spaces, raising questions about the ways in which we inhabit a city under the forces of capitalism and rapid industrialization. In terms of photographic techniques, Kim uses standard lens without any extra modification or excessive manipulation and captures ‘realistic’ scenes of architecture and streets in their genuine forms and colours seen with naked eyes. However, in the meantime, all his photographs are taken in a deliberately calculated timing and environment. As Kim has indicated in a number of interviews, he usually visits each location at least three times before the camera is actually held in position to capture those immediate moments of urban sceneries. His photographs are the result not of a simple chance encounter, but of an extended process of exploring and inhabiting a place, which enables him to experiment with varied natural lighting conditions that lead to changes of colour, and, as he often suggests, ‘to show the possibilities for a new interpretation of a city or nature scene by providing a direct visual experience’. For this exhibition, Kim’s works taken in America typically feature empty streets and deserted buildings, which are silently abandoned and devoid of people. Kim does not specify the city, but gives some vague information about street names and numbers, allowing viewers to engender their own understandings and interpretations about these specific locations. His photographs depict street walls, doorways, staircases as well as the front and rear exterior of buildings, with a particular focus on their colourfully painted surfaces. On the one hand, the camera lens permits him to zoom in, scrutinize and make visible easily overlooked details—cracks and paint peelings in the walls or dirt and mould in shadowy corners, which indicate traces of history and human existence. On the other, Kim’s photographs refuse to provide any clear clues on the basis of which viewers may imagine or empathise with people who once occupied these residential spaces. Moreover, despite the fact that windows are seen in a few photographs, they are curtained, concealed with a large-scale advertising poster or captured with the reflections of outside sceneries. His works prevent a clear view of the interior of houses and buildings that might allow viewers to flesh out narratives of home and dwelling. Via his positioning of the camera and peculiar photographic composition, the three-dimensional depth of streets, buildings and spaces is somehow truncated. When exhibited, his photographs appear more like two-dimensional, abstract paintings which call to mind classic pieces by artists, such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. They create an immersive visual environment of light and colour, yet oust viewers from their imaginative self-placement within or in relation to those depicted urban spaces. Their abstract, painterly nature evokes palpable feelings of detachment and exclusion, which makes viewers wonder whether they actually exist in reality and impedes any assumption about embodied habitation. At the edge of photography and painting, Kim’s works constitute an uninhabited city that unsettles viewing subjects who fail to experience a space of dwelling. A series of questions relating to how and when these places or buildings were built and then abandoned remain inconclusive and open for viewers to bring their own answers. With his photographs, Kim tend to make people consider the ways by which industrialization and modern urbanization can suddenly make things obsolete and what we have left behind for the sake of economic and social advancement. Moreover, as Kim has indicated, his works do not simply end up with urban depression and tragedy. Rather, by depicting desolated scenes of cityscape in their most vivid and splendid moments, his photographs also evoke hope about urban rejuvenation, by returning to the natural field of colour and light. With his spectacular photographic scenes, Kim, in a way, recalls an idealized, nostalgic past which has not yet been tainted by destructive forces of capitalism and industrialization. His exhibition at Soluna Fine Art also includes a couple of photographs which feature the walls of Korean wooden Hanok houses in an abstract, calligraphic manner. In contrast with his uninhabited, but colourful urban landscape in America, this series of works are black and white. Kim took all the photographs in winter. By virtue of manipulating the visual condition of the surrounding environment, he changed his colour palette and modified the appearance of these traditional Korean houses, most of which have lost their original forms through time. With his works, Kim wiped off various colours painted on them by people over the years, highlighting their architectural structures and bringing to the fore a set of seemingly similar but individually diverse images. Walls featured in the works form various abstract shapes and patterns, which seal the inside of the houses, refusing visual or physical intrusion and engendering explicit bodily detachment and spectatorial exclusion. Here, viewers, who fail to experience these houses of others as a place of habitation are compelled to think about a fading history of conventional dwelling. This series of works interrogate similar questions about what has been discarded and what still remains through the process of human development and civilization. Kim’s photographs, I would argue, provide a distinctive insight into the contradiction between material advancement that rapid social progress has produced and the concomitant loss of social traditions and cultural attachments. In the meantime, his works indicate the longing for urban regeneration by returning back to nature and recreating and rediscovering the past anew in the vanishing present. -