Amu

Galleries

I first visited the UK in 1997 and later took an MA course in photography at the Kent Institute of Art and Design. I had begun studying photography and graphic design in Korea more than ten years previously, and was tutored by acclaimed practitioners whose own apprenticeships preceded the digital era. The evolution of photography in Korea was uniquely constrained by occupation, division, war and dictatorship. One of my mentors, the veteran photographer Joo Myung-Duck, came to pre-eminence after his ‘Lost Names’ project in 1966. His subsequent work and that of his peers is still largely unknown internationally. Their documentation of the urban environment, and the ineradicable legacies of the tumultuous twentieth century, was exhaustive. My country has undergone several cycles of desolation and rebuilding and the restoration of its native aesthetic may take many more decades.

I have concentrated on landscape rather than documentary photography. Partly for the less disfiguring imprint of history but mainly by virtue of its topography and climate, the landscape of the British Isles affords greater scope for ‘editing power.’ The quality and variability of light allows the landscape photographer to trace the contentions with humanity that it remembers. There, such traces have more often been preserved as raw material and imaginative space. I have sometimes sought them out amidst architecture in various stages of dissolution. For the subject of my research project I chose the De La Warr Pavilion in Sussex, working in the empty building in the winter of 2003 shortly before its extensive refurbishment. I don’t restrict myself to film, but even when using a digital camera I accept the traditional idea of my craft as creating a temporal record. The attraction of the subject is its historical aspect, as a witness to human activity. I want to represent the perception of successive layers of human interaction with and investment in the landscape, not necessarily with the inclusion of figures, whose presence may vitiate the imaginative response stimulated by this representation.

Each gallery page (links above) shows nine examples of my work. During 2023 and 2024 all my photographs were made with a mirrorless camera. For earlier work, as indicated, positive or negative film, or a DSR, were used variously.

Inquiries welcome at KimBoKyoung@protonmail.com

Stones Unturned: photographs by Kim, Bo-Kyoung at Space Haam, Seoul

The practice of photography, like many forms of artistic representation, is often inspired by a quest for truth. It may alternatively involve an investigation of deception. Our manipulation of the two themes leads to results that are very similar. It is for this reason that the question of what is true and what is false, what is subjective and what is objective, has been energizing us for the last few thousand years.

The honest photographer, indulging in a kind of reportage, makes certain statements in their work which are then passed on to the beholder for interpretation. Where the photographer is inspired, he or she may look to direct the viewer in a given way. Whenever a piece of representational art like a photograph is considered, the first question must be: what precisely is trying to be said?

Leaving aside the questions and theorizing, the distinctive and overriding feature of the pictures which make up this exhibition – of the accommodation by nature of man-made stone structures – is the relationship between the hewn stone and its natural setting; how one is organically connected to the other, or else how it is somehow distinct, if not entirely separate.

The Siem Reap photographs alone offer a riot of examinations of this theme. In each, we are given the item, the carving, the figurine, the building viewed through the lens either of the natural world which surrounds it or that of the elements of its own construction. We therefore see in every case how the natural seeps into the man-made so as to fundamentally alter the poetry of its character. The masterful composition of the tree and the temple is one example, in which the natural and the man-made mirror the features of each other in the mystical environment with the goddess at its centre.

Sometimes, of course, the man-made cannot properly, artistically, exist at all without the natural elements that surround it. The beautiful Gothic windows and fan vaulting of Gloucester Cathedral are not just illuminated by the sunlight streaming in; they are rendered complete. Similarly, the ruined walls of Llanthony Priory with their brave, empty windows standing steadfast against the elements are not just best shown off by the rolling green hills which mock their stern uprights and hopeful arches; they offer something extracted from the natural world for the hills to dance around, to make complete themselves.

We each have our own ideas about what exactly constitutes artistic truth and what, by contrast, is likely to lead only to empty deception. In respect of either, the photographer’s pursuit – with cogent examples to give it credence – is circular, and therefore endless. What Kim does instead in the pictures exhibited here is to step out of this well-worn loop and lead us to an examination of the inter-connectedness of the building blocks from which we make our world.

Joshua Drapkin, alumnus of The Courtauld Institute of Art

London, 2013

Photographs by Kim Bo-Kyoung of the De la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill

Kim’s work is an essay on the theme of estrangement, and the legacy of Modernism. Her interest in the architect Eric Mendelsohn is obvious and being, like him, a foreigner in this landscape perhaps helps her to trace and revivify his original response to it in the architecture. She applies a consummate knowledge of the building’s history with imaginative awareness and the know-how of her craft, and it is back to that history that the audience is continually directed.

The marks of attrition and decay that the refurbishment is about to erase are important to the photographer, developed in the mediation of the building between its users and contents inside, and the light and space outside. The building, as intended by Mendelsohn and affirmed in this work, enhances that space without obtruding upon it. But my strong impression as a painter is that these are not photographs of light and space only, but also of gravity.

Meanwhile, everything that is seen is made use of. As, for example, the camera is aimed through a damaged windowpane, a gazebo on the distant promenade is set between an angle of yellow-and-black tape and a crescent-shaped hole in the glass that encloses a cluster of shimmering raindrops. Nothing is more natural to the location and climate than the unity of the grey into which gazebo, sea and sky dissolve and the vivid block of green grass that underpins the whole. The composition is resolved by cutting in the dark borders of interior wall; this gathering of forms echoes the rhythms found elsewhere in the structure. Where to look, how to look, when to take the shot; the artist’s knowledge of, and love for, her subject guide her decisions as much as acquired technical adroitness. In this way the space in and around the building, its fabric, contents and detritions are reshaped into an eloquent but direct representation of what is seen, touched, felt and intuited by someone who is actually there.

John Foyle, painter

London, 2004