Each interior is meticulously lit and staged with scenarios and actors. The jewel-like colors and sophisticated finish of the scenes captured behind the glass enhance the sense both of a supremely stylized modern aesthetic and the caged loneliness of the protagonists on show, themes in all of Kim's works which she describes as "seeing by feeling." In a city where individuality and privacy are fiercely guarded, looking can become a transgressive act. Kim's interiors are similarly charged with both isolation and display, obverse aspects of the same modernity. Her lens explores enticing interiors that resist penetration. What one sees through the window is a culture secretly obsessed with looking.
Kim's oeuvre redefines and reshapes our sense of architecture by making the interior contiguous with the very look and feel of the cool modernity of the structure itself. When there are people inside, the building becomes a showcase of their activities within -- a museum, hotel, office building, residence or dance studio. With no activity or inhabitants to light up the interior, these all-glass buildings lose all interest, with nothing to display. This play on display is highlighted in Kim's four-work series on the Langen Foundation, an all-glass museum near Neuss, Germany. The museum is a minimalist, weightless and delicate structure of glass and steel, seemingly afloat on a pond of water. As the space fills up in consecutive sequence, first with a single person, then several and eventually a crowd of people, the architecture is transformed.
As an artist, Kim employs the building to paint a precise human story in a specific moment in time. As a photographer and master student of Thomas Ruff, however, it is the directness of film that she harnesses to her advantage to capture the transparency of the moment. This gives her work an immediacy unavailable in a different medium, no matter how deft the artistic hand. By stripping down the image to the nakedly visible, Kim reveals herself a purist who delights in the geometry of form.
No comments:
Post a Comment