photography, its craft and concept

The role of photography in the works of many contemporary artists has less to do with documenting realities but more with deconstructing them. Seoul-born London-based artist Ayoung Kim draws on the unique position of photography at the lived border of reality and representation

Kim is concerned with how we confront and consume 'news' as a fleeting spectacle. She makes news clippings, mostly about crime scenes, from newspapers, TV and the Internet, and visits to take photographs of their actual locations or the places that her imagination associates the news with. Using the prints of these photographic images, she constructs a three-dimensional photomontage set like a popup book, and then re-photographs the restaged scenes. The title of each photograph is taken from a news headline.

ACCEPT NORTH KOREA INTO THE NUCLEAR CLUB OR BOMB IT NOW, 11 OCT, 2006 (PHOTO: I-MYU)

MAN HITS BUS ROOF AFTER 70FT DEATH PLUNGE, 29 MAY, 2007 (PHOTO: I-MYU)

BRITISH TEACHER FOUND BURIED IN BATHTUB OF SAND, 28 MARCH, 2007 (PHOTO: I-MYU)

STAGE SET FOR THE ABOVE BRITISH TEACHER FOUND... PIECE
(PHOTO: 32ND JOONGANG FINE ARTS PRIZE)

The scenes that Kim's final photographs delineate are concrete and convincing but with an unreal or even surreal atmosphere. Kim's method of montage reassembles photographs into a stage set and flattens them out again into a photograph. From the process of montage in which fragmented realities are put together into a new spatiotemporal frame emerge certain disparities of meanings between what really takes place and what is represented. We are often drawn to news not as knowledge of the world but as a represented spectacle. What Kim stages is our unconscious treatment of news by making a montage from our own perspectives of seeing the world. The effect of her photographs comes into play by oscillating between the two-dimensional surface and the three-dimensional substance.

News floods everyday, and much of it does not remain in our mind for a lasting moment. Kim takes hold of a transient spectacle of news by putting to use the intertwined dimensions of photographs as documents, materials and representations. Swinging between two-dimensional pictures and three-dimensional sculptures, what the artist produces is a photographic site where the discrepancies between the world as it is presented and the world as it is represented are made observable. She creates a site of meditation on the transforming terms of photography through a chain of presentation and representation.

* CROSS - New World or No World (3rd Seoul International Photography Festival, 1 December 2009 - 31 January 2010)
* The Cinematic_Montage (Seoul Museum of Art, 6 June - 4 October 2009)
* Ephemera, Ayoung Kim solo show (I-MYU, London, 24 July - 15 August 2009)