Kim Taedong, Day Break-018, 2011, Digital-pigment print © Kim Taedong

I first met Kim Taedong a few years ago, when he applied for a photography grant for young artists awarded by a certain cultural foundation. Kim was giving a presentation of his work to the panel of judges. They were questioning him closely about the fact that his portfolio included a vast amount of notes and sketches as well as photographs, and Kim was struggling to keep up with the answers.

The sketches in question laid out a somewhat haphazard narrative of the artist’s relationship with the urban spaces he portrayed in his photography. This odd pairing of sketches and photography intrigued the judges and they were peppering the artist with questions, no one less satisfied than the artist as he struggled to put his thoughts into words.

The quality of his work aside, this shortcoming alone should have diminished his standing compared to the other applicants who were giving flawless presentations of their work. With Kim, however, it was a pleasure to hear him speak with unpolished words. In that setting, with judges grilling him left and right, the way he plodded on in that painfully shy and halting manner but still got his point across gave him a strangely charming quality, as if he led a life that did not quite belong in this world. It was also a glimpse into the way that a young artist was living.
 
Today, contemporary art embraces so many different kinds of thought and practice and in such a kaleidoscope of daring ways that it feels as if there is nothing new under the sun. Rather than experiment with the new, Kim Taedong’s photography records his interest in how things that exist in the present appear or are interpreted differently.

This work takes place in the setting of Seoul, the city where he and his neighbors live. The artist’s focus is not on the narrative of Seoul the metropolis, however, but rather discovering a different or hidden side to the familiar places that we frequent every day yet never look at very closely. While we sleep, the artist prowls the streets of Seoul at night, photographing the strangers he meets in a city that looks significantly different than it does during the day. These are the photographs collected in his ‘Daybreak’(2011-) series.

This collection of chance encounters, of strangers that the artist met in the street from late at night to dawn, is actually a record of a particular instant of life within urban spaces. However, it is not as if the artist only begins working at night. He drifts around the city during daylight hours as well and once he has decided upon a location that will look significantly different at night than it does during the day, he returns at night, armed with his trusty Contax 67mm, and simply waits for strangers to pass by.

When a stranger appears in that space, he bravely approaches them for a picture. Some people shy away from his sudden appearance, while others readily let him take their picture. Those who agree to the photo shoot patiently go through as many poses as the artist requests, and through the weak artificial lighting, digital camera, and data transmitted to the artist’s laptop, reappear in front of us as characters in the artist’s work.

The artist explains this process, “urban spaces at daybreak have lost their function as part of the city, but sometimes I take comfort in that silence and spookiness.” Reinterpreted, the people that exist in this kind of space and time appear as strangers wandering about in a city transformed by an unfamiliar, unreal space.

Remember, these models were strangers to the artist five minutes before they found themselves in this unusual situation, set in the vast manufactured environment that is the city at night. What happened is that they briefly became intimate allies in that instant of rapport established by the click of the camera, the long, ominous shadows cast by the street lamps, and the empty silence of that particular moment. This rapport is subtle but clearly present in the artist’s work, a tinge of resonance, like the spooky lightness of fog rolling in night.

The portrait of a woman posing in front of a flickering street lamp, looking back at the camera, or the middle-aged man with a paunch, standing at a crossroads that must be busy during the day, or the girl calmly standing inside a sea of empty buildings appear to be almost mythical characters in that there is no way of knowing what they were doing there at that hour. In this way the artist creates distinct portraits of strangers and unfamiliar places.

Relying on the visual rather than the verbal, completed through chance encounters rather than continuous relationships, his work is as sensuous as his reply that he is “inspired by what he sees with his eyes.” The depth of his work, however, goes beyond that of the merely sensuous. Before shooting his subjects, the artist visits all of the places that arrested his eyes, takes pictures of them, and pores over them again and again as he decides what direction his work will take.

However, this direction is not a premeditated concept. There are some artists that decide on a particular contemporary aesthetic and work around that concept, but it is often the case that their work is more readily explained with words than by viewing the work itself. These words often blind us to what we see with our own eyes and obstruct the senses, glibly inflating the value of the work far beyond its worth.

Yet with Kim Taedong’s work there are no words, just photographs. The artist expresses himself in terms of the instinctual rather than the intellectual, with this sense resulting in photographs that are directly visual. Fittingly enough, it is quite difficult to put a clear-cut description of his photographs into words.

The colors that appear in his photography, the awkward poses of his subjects, the ambiguous atmosphere created by that time between night and day, teetering between what is real and what is unreal, are all qualities of the artist who struggles to express himself in words. I predict that this will become his strategy to distinguish his work from other artists in the cutthroat world of contemporary art.

However, that strategy is not something that can be planned or faked, but merely exists in the artistic senses and sensibility. And so, until he reaches another turning point, he will continue his work of wandering about the city and showing what he finds. His strategy of capturing images and endlessly roaming the city with no particular design or concept will always allow us to see, with our own eyes, the unfamiliar that is buried in our own familiar lives and places.

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