Soo Kim (born South Korea, 1969) moved to Los Angeles in 1980. After earning
a bachelor of arts degree from the University of California, Riverside,
she combined studies in critical writing, art and film at the California
Institute of the Arts for her master of fine arts.
Kim's practice as an artist blends the making of photographs with the critical
interpretation of images on a broader level. Recent bodies of work employ
the techniques of cutting and layering prints, introducing areas of absence
or disruption to address the issues of photographic transparency and the
immediate consumption of images. Kim believes that the lengthy process required
to create her photographs infuses them with a "slowness" that finds its
counterpart in the amount of time it takes the viewer to read them. Conceived
as series, her work often makes reference to literature, notably in A
Week inside Two Days (2005) or They Stop Looking at the Sky (2006),
the latter an installation of large photographic collages for the Pasadena
Museum of California Art.
Her current body of work, The Corners of the Sea, combines portraits
and landscapes to consider different degrees of stillness and action that
can occupy an image, and the ways those variances may be inscribed within
different genres. In the images, quiet and noise fill the space simultaneously;
a contemplative portrait of a man overlaid with a tumultuous image of an
explosion cut out of the photograph (The Corners of the Sea), or a cityscape
of an ancient city cut out to create an image of the city that is more active
and disorienting (Falling Suddenly to her Knees).
Survey 2008-2009 [view
images]