Installation view of 《Sister City: Off the Map》 (Space Cadalogs, 2023) ©Yuja Kim

Thinking from the Outside, an Impersonal Gaze

Lim Jeongyeon / Literary Critic, Professor, Department of Korean Language and Literature, Anyang University
 
Yuja Kim’s artistic practice begins from a position that breaks away from the inertia and fixed orientation of photography as a medium, opening a space for an aesthetic and ethical turn within photographic art. This exhibition was conceived as an attempt to remember moments of chance and contingency encountered during a journey to Kaohsiung, Taiwan—a city that maintains a sister-city partnership with Daejeon. Ironically, however, none of the photographs function as unique signs that point directly to either Daejeon or Kaohsiung as specific cities. Rather, what these images evoke are people who need not be this particular person or that, and places that need not be here or there.

Installation view of 《Sister City: Off the Map》 (Space Cadalogs, 2023) ©Yuja Kim

What connects here and there, then and now, us and them, is only the loose solidarity implied by the name “sister city.” The artist remains wary of allowing our gaze to follow the index and become trapped within fixed images or captivated by predetermined meanings. To this end, Kim maintains not a first-person perspective that asserts the exclusive authority of photography or the superiority of the creator, but an impersonal gaze that belongs to no one.

For Yuja Kim, photography is less a tool for revealing and representing facts than a medium that draws forward thinking from the “outside,” beyond what can be captured by the frame. In her work, images are not fixed to a single meaning, and relationships are neither intimate nor enduring. They are formed and released as tenuous, incidental encounters—moments in which the artist and others briefly share a coordinate of time and space, only to part again without obligation.

The most useful tool for inducing walking in an unfamiliar city is a map, such as Google Maps. Yet a map, too, is not the world itself but merely a system of signs that represents the world in a universal and singular way. Rather than confirming position and direction within the map, Kim chooses instead to create paths by modulating speed and time through walking that deviates from prescribed routes.

She repositions unnamed places—abandoned, omitted, and unrecorded on maps—into the role of speakers, each carrying its own distinct and compelling story. These stories sometimes resonate with one another, sustaining a narrative flow, and at other times form independent sequences, unfolding their own particular accounts.

Installation view of 《Sister City: Off the Map》 (Space Cadalogs, 2023) ©Yuja Kim

Faces that do not look squarely into the camera but gaze toward some indeterminate elsewhere; loosely interlaced fingers rather than tightly clenched hands; sunlight and wind slipping into street corners and shaded recesses; crumpled, broken, scattered traces and shadows left to their own devices; the fragile, subtle movements left by blades of grass and pebbles; and the sounds and tactile sensations perceived within each cleared margin…

These elements seem still, yet sway with motion, seep into other images, and tint one another. In the moment when all boundaries blur—between stillness and commotion, pause and movement, permeation and saturation—photography opens onto the outside world it has held within. Through this fissure, we may find ourselves layering familiar faces onto the portraits of others, or overlaying known memories onto unfamiliar landscapes.

What becomes clear by this point is the realization that paths leading to someone or somewhere are never fossilized within maps. Yuja Kim’s “outside” is a space that expands the inside and broadens the horizon of thought through an impersonal gaze and loose solidarity that belong to no one in particular. Within it remain things that have been excluded and concealed—those that were unseen, unheard, and previously imperceptible.

References