Chung, Yeon Shim - Associate Prof., Hongik University
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APRIL 2016
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I. Front and rear sides of buildings that become canvases and architectural surfaces
Since completing his photography studies at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Kim Woo Young has taken numerous photographs, which sought for overarching diverse realms such as landscape, portrait, and advertisement that were completed by the artist’s hands. These have been widely recognized as photographs within a painterly context as well as advertisement photography. After working in Seoul, Kim Woo Young abruptly left for the USA.
As a photographer who has been making 'travel' an issue as an imperative aspect of his work, for Kim, departure does not refer to a simple migration as in 'Pack and Leave'. The places to which the artist proceeds are not sightseeing spots or shopping centers in some metropolis with hordes of people, but rather particular cities or buildings in which many people once resided. Although the people who had lived in these spaces have disappeared, the wind of Mother Nature, light, and traces of the spaces have remained intact, and sometimes one or two people still use the space. As an observer with strong perseverance, Kim takes photographs of the front and rear exteriors of such buildings. Rather than intervening or excessively manipulating photographs per se, the artist focuses on catching the vestiges of the very surfaces of the buildings.
The various streets of California in <Sunset Boulevard> or those of Promenade du Vieux-Port and Old Columbus Road are the reflections of the photographer as if he, the artist, has been seeing and observing them as personification. Although the buildings are depicted in the photographs, it is peculiar that the names of the boulevards or streets are used as titles for the works. Instead of appropriating the names of the buildings, the artist employs the specific names of the streets; perhaps in that he perceives the identities of the buildings and the locations in the same tale.
Two vestiges are found in the partial section of the façade, the front side of the buildings, and the rear side of the buildings. A light, reflected through naturally, is buried in the shade. These works are not individually separate; sometimes the artist takes photographs from the same street multiple times and juxtaposes them alongside each other. Like the ‘typology’ photographs of Hilla and Bernd Becher, the photographs of Kim Woo Young embrace typological displacements and photographical stories toward place and space. The second attribute in his photographs is the colorful radiance and the flow of lines on the surface of the buildings. The greyish and dusky streets, the color covering the surfaces, the lines connecting these faces in the streets and buildings are of the unexpected aesthetic consequences that empower Kim Woo Young’s works to painterly abstraction.
Although Kim Woo Young received his education in Korea and New York, he has long resided in California, and he has worked at capturing the singular light and breath of Mother Nature in California. I could not help reflecting that his works are naturally linked to abstract paintings based on light; that is, abstract paintings that can be found in the contemporary works of the American West. The photographs taken by a digital camera naturally encounter the painterly abstract, lines, faces, and spaces. Different from the minimalist the American East Coast artists who appropriate monochromic color and indulge in the use of industrial materials, the minimalist artists from the American West, such as James Turrell, take aesthetic pleasure in nature, light, and fierce color; these are anathema to the minimalists in New York. In contrast to the stern or strict aesthetic taste beloved by the New York minimalists and the well-harmonized sculptures in gallery spaces (white cube), artists in California seek nature, light, and color rather than indoor spaces. When one thinks of the characteristics of minimalism in the American West, Kim Woo Young’s works lead one to rediscover light and nature, abstract color and the traces on the surfaces of various buildings.
II. Photographic acts of Kim Woo Young: painterly and abstract
One can feel a sort of emancipation from Kim Woo Young’s works, an autonomy that cannot be proffered to the works of Seoul-based artists. This differentiates and significantly varies from the contents in the solo exhibition Kim Woo Young held in Park Ryu Sook Gallery. His typological interest can be caught by a glimpse at the earlier photographs, but there is a difference at the point in which the artist transmogrifies city spaces and buildings into other painterly spaces. This feature makes the works move back and forth between a peculiar threshold of photographic and painterly realms. Line, color, and light are considerably maneuvered and restrained in a collapse of the threshold.
Among the other works in the exhibition in Park Ryu Sook Gallery, the <E 6th St> series, is associated with monochrome abstract paintings. The surfaces of the buildings seem to be the effect from which painterly brush strokes repeatedly coat over canvases. That is, the surfaces are reduced to those of canvases, and the paints seem to be naturally steeped in the surfaces. This initiates an association with an abstract world in Korean Dansaekhwa, whose exhibitions are globally introduced, to the painterly color and the color of the buildings’ surfaces. A duplicity defined as strong sense of Korean from westerners’ perspectives can be shown in this particularity.
Continual inspection of Kim Woo Young’s works, help one see that once inconspicuous details gradually resurface. In <Eden Garden>, the figures of people that had gone unnoticed at first glance can be felt beyond the window. Also, the other works directly provide the history of buildings and cities without dismissing detailed figures such as the ornamental frames and structures of the buildings. Buildings that are at least a hundred years old are found in the works. Once city spaces that boomed with large populations held their stories of seeking urbantopia and also presented the history of American immigration.
Kim Woo Young now seeks empty and even dilapidated buildings, and endows travel with a special meaning. The works whose contents are from a particular building are entitled to have the names of the streets in their cities. The routes and itineraries of travel are the inscribed specific spaces by his photographic acts. The action of taking photographs has been recognized as the uppermost honest act in indicating traces of the past. For the artist, a photograph still means an ethnographic action of chronicling the late traces, acts, and history. Typological photographic work is still the imperative aspect in his works, just as travel holds a symbolic meaning to the artist because we can read through vacant gaps and itineraries, which are not known by photographic outcomes.
However, it is clear that his works cannot be seen as simple tourist photographs, and documentations of place. After taking numerous photographs, he scrutinizes all details that cannot be captured by the camera lens in his computer, and he discovers photographic, painterly, abstract lines and sides. The travel goes through under a communion process of images and of rediscovering the photographs in his studio. Including these processes, all outputs are entirely dissolved in Kim Woo Young’s photographic works. Thus, sometimes his works are totally photographic; and sometimes they are painterly or abstract; and sometimes itineraries per se make the disciplinant’s repetitive gestures kept ruminating; California or Korean attributes also overlap. His photographs, which are placed in the slit of this threshold, can be found in Kim Woo Young’s <Along The Boulevard>.
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