Atta Kim: Paradoxical Aesthetics of Existence
Lee Joon (deputy director, Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art)

Photographing numerous people for many years, Atta Kim has personally experienced that all humans and all beings have their own reasons and values for existence. The reason why he changed his name to “Atta” (“I-Other”) is also closely related to his belief that by taking seriously the encounters and relationships between the self and the others, the self and the world, one learns that all that exists in the universe is organically related. Kim’s fundamental interest in human existence began to unfold in a more ambitious way with his large-scale The Museum Project, begun in 1995. Kim came to another turning point in his work after The Museum Project, on which he vigorously worked from 1995 until 2002.

Around the time Kim embarked on On-Air Project, Kim stopped using the transparent acrylic box and started employing superimposed images made through digital editing technology along with long exposures. Although these techniques are far from unique to his work, Kim utilized them to further develop his subject. The technique of layering images?superimposing tens and even hundreds of them?is made possible thanks to digital technology, but it retains the photographic characteristics of recording and also allows the artist to meaningfully recompose the topics he has always been interested in?i.e., human identity and question of existence. Some examples of this methodology include works like Mandala, Sacheonwangsang, Kiss, 100 Women(Tibetan), Man of the World, and The Last Supper.
Man of the World, consisting of superimposed images of 100 men from 100 countries and made over the course of three years, is representative work by Kim. The layered image appears, at first glance, to be a soft-focused, dissipated portrait. The moment the viewer learns that it is the result of 100 different identities from 100 different nations, s/he begins to imagine the diversity of skin tones and ethnicities. In the course of being layered on top of others, specific characteristics and identities gradually attain ambiguity. As images of individuals from different groups accumulate on top of one another, boundaries collapse and a whole new identity emerges. Kim’s series of portraits, such as Korean, Tibetan, and Mongolian, along with Man of the World, invites viewers to think again about the meanings of the individual, and by extension, of race and nation, as well as ethnicity and identity in this era of globalization.
Through the combined methodology of superimposed image and long exposure, Kim has developed his belief that “all that exists will disappear” into further evolved aesthetic forms. Examples of long exposure include works that capture a couple having sex for an hour, a two-hour-long soccer match, an auto show, the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), and the urban landscapes of Beijing, Shanghai, and New York exposed for eight hours. In Soccer Game, though the players endlessly ran around the field for two hours during the actual match, the ground is empty in the picture except few traces and only with a blurry reminder of the audiences who kept their seats during that time. Taking advantage of such temporalities, Kim started addressing the question of remaining and disappearance, existence and non-existence. As in his own words, Kim’s photography contrasts the medium’s defining nature of representing, registering, and recording images with the natural law of “all that exists ultimately disappears,” and by doing so, reveals the realities of existence.

And his interest in existence and disappearance, the visible and the invisible evolved into Monologues of Ice, which utilizes ice’s physical nature of transforming into liquid with a change of temperature. In this series, he made ice sculptures of Mao Zedong, the late supreme politician and leader of China, Marilyn Monroe, an icon of capitalism and popular culture, and Atta, the artist’s self-portrait, and captured images of their melting, and then photographed the water they turned in a round container. The ultimate product of Monologues of Ice consists of photographs, but the process is closer to a kind of performance.
The water from the four-day-long melting of Mao’s portrait ended up in 108 glasses and was combined with the water from the other two sculptures, then transferred to 1,000 containers and used to water flowers. Through this image of the solid of ice turning into the liquid, Kim gives form to the ultimate emptiness of human existence, desire, and power, and also symbolically expresses the question of existence and non-existence through suggesting a new revival rather than permanent disappearance.

From his working processes, one understands that Kim’s work is more than simple composed or staged photography. He was one of the artists who realized early on that photography is one of the most powerful mediums of expression available today. But he refused to be satisfied with straightforward or documentary photography that is merely faithful to mechanical reproduction or reality and persisted in endlessly developing new mediums and forms. While he maximizes the medium specificities of the large-format camera he uses, Kim is, at the same time, free from photography’s formal framework more than anyone else. What is ultimately important for Atta Kim is less photography per se than his drive to express what he hopes to express through photography. He has been interpreting his questions about existence with the photographic medium that represents all that which exists as is. If The Museum Project was a search for human self-discovery and the meaning of existence, On-Air Project was about the paradox of “all that exists ultimately disappears.” In that light, Kim’s work seems to embody the Buddhist idea of “impermanence of all existence.”
Perhaps, the work that best articulates this idea is his India series, debuting in the present solo exhibition at Rodin Gallery. Of course, this most recent eight-hour-long-exposure photograph offers something greatly visually pleasurable, but what is more interesting, perhaps, is the Indala series’ almost monochrome, abstracted landscapes. Without a didactic text or explanation, the image is not read as a landscape but rather as a highly minimal monochrome abstract painting. Ironically, he made an empty abstract painting by utilizing a technique of photography, which is by definition faithful to representation. But there are numerous images and stories (narratives) overlaid here. Countless stores in markets’ alleyways, endless waves of people, bicycles, and cars, people’s expressions, temples, all kinds of customs, and complexly entangled urban landscapes all melt into the minimalist abstract space of the Indala series. The more the images of India Kim photographed and collected are superimposed on top of one another, the less they are reminiscent of the original specific images. They disappear as if in an ashen sandstorm. The lucid affirmation of the meaning of existence through disappearance?one may say that this is the very paradoxical aesthetics of existence. Mysteriously, it transcends the world of India’s forms and materials and leads us to a spiritual world of non-material and contemplation.