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9/12/2008

In Sook Kim

Galerie RX, Paris

Curated by Beatrice Ancillon

"Saturday Night", In the Room series by In Sook Kim, we see photographs of people and the room(s) that they inhabit. In the viewing process, these human subjects become both the seen and the seers (literally: voyeurs). While some appear at ease with themselves, others seem harassed or imprisoned by their own needs.

In the 21st century, a proscenium is too often the rectangular frame of a TV monitor or LCD flatscreen. It seems like only yesterday, meaning during the 20th century, that the idea of a proscenium referred to the real thing: the wall that separates the audience from the stage in a theater. This is the very piece of architecture In Sook Kim makes real and symbolic use of in her photographic works, and largely because her both exceptional and modern gaze allows her to.

As a visual artist for whom photography is only one of several mediums she works in, In Sook Kim has a great emotional passion for seeing. In fact, the act of seeing is her forte. Her gaze is so consuming that she calls herself more an observer than an artist: "I don't interpret or criticise, I see." In her photographs, the notion of "seeing one's subject better than one depicts it" might even be called the guiding artistic principle.

Her work evolves in three ways: from found computer-enhanced data, from extravagantly staged shoots like those arranged for the photographs Das Abendessen (The Dinner) and The Auction, and from what has been called her "demonic" study of the female body.

Regardless of what generates her work, In Sook Kim imparts to her viewers a world in which people appear as the roles they play and not necessarily as the people they really are.

While a master's class student of the photographer Thomas Ruff, In Sook Kim completed her conceptual series-and-study entitled Muses, a fragile yet provoking work on the female countenance as an inspirational device. Her Room series, a subsequent work, has an even greater reach: stretching from questioning what people desire to celebrating what makes them endure and stalk loneliness, it charts a "social" distance between the perimeters of eroticism and the depths of urban isolation. Without resorting to an academic or "Thomas Ruffian-" approach, a fleeting awareness of both seems present in In Sook Kim's photographs. Yet her images are best defined by the fact that she treats seeing as feeling, and photography as the proscenium for an emotional and poetic journey.
Extracted from - Eyemazing Magazine 2008 - Text by Karl E. Johnson

Image: Saturday Night, 2007 - 198 x 300 cm C-Print, diasec, framed © In Sook Kim

Opening reception: Wednesday, 10 December 2008, 6-9pm

Acknowledgments to Eike and Claudia Hovermann

Galerie RX
6 avenue Delcassé, Paris 8e
Tues-Sat 12 midday - 7pm

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