GALLERY 2

16 Oct 2008 — 8 Nov 2008

KDK(Dokyun Kim)'s page

KDK(Dokyun Kim)
New SF

The solo exhibition of KDK (Kim Dokyun), an artist active in both Germany and Korea, features his photographic work which moves beyond the boundaries of reality and illusion. Kim studied at the Dusseldorf Art School (Kunstakademie Duesseldorf) and his work is based on the Dusseldorf Art School’s New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), but it is distinguished from this art movement in that it enables us to feel a more spectacular sensuous, emotional experience. While KDK puts emphasis on neutrality and frontality in his early work, since then, he has begun to boldly capture cut parts of buildings that are not able to be recognized as whole forms.

Showcased in the first section of the exhibition are 20 pieces from the W series that focus on the interiors or corners of a building, not its exterior. The artist suddenly realized an idiosyncratic sense of space when he woke up in the morning and looked at a wall which was confusing whether it was protruded or dented. Based on this experience, he generates illusory spaces by capturing the contact points between planes and lines. This illusory effect is maximized by the changes in shades of light. His W series can be seen as a wide variety of experimentations with cubes, except for some of his pieces that show windows or wallpaper patterns. In this series, Kim demonstrates spatial variations such as extremely enlarged narrow spaces or infinitely extended broad spaces by adding shading to the fundamental elements such as point, line, and plane. His geometric photographs that appear like minimalist pictures can be seen as the amusement of sense and form and are not a type of cold-hearted formal experiment. What is also significant is that he presents real spaces.

The New SF series displayed in the second section of the exhibition, an extension of the previous SF series, is characterized by a sense of spectacular space. In this section, the artist presents sf.Sel-11 that he created for the 2008 Art Spectrum exhibition. This series enables viewers to experience a sense of virtual space, as if drawing the surface of the moon to its inside. In this work, Kim photographed the rotunda of the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art building designed by Mario Botta and reinterpreted it from his own visual angle.

His photographs, such as sf.Sel-11, that provoke a realistic yet unfamiliar, surrealistic atmosphere through the stark contrast of repetitive purple circular motives in a black square frame and sf.Tko-6 that brings about a visual illusion with the contrast of black and white, straight lines, circles, and dots, are both reminiscent of the spectacle scenes in SF films. Hong Bora, director of Gallery Factory, assessed KDK’s work in the following passage: “KDK’s work can be associated with the spectacular scenes from well-made Hollywood films and has the effect of pure entertainment. Even though we might try to disregard its presence, our gaze automatically turns toward the work. His work shows real architectural spaces in a realistic manner. His photographic images are impossible to capture with the naked eye as they are so minute and transform the real space from a single moment into the scene of a film. I believe the urban images in his photography are quite realistic, but at the same time are also strange and surrealistic enabling us to have unfamiliar, sensuous experiences when facing them directly.”

The magnetism KDK’s work particularly has is above all his rediscovery of space. While a recent tendency of photography is to use models, to present staged scenes, or to combine each space after taking photographs, what is significant in KDK’s work is a previous process. His work is completed by removing some hampering elements for his ideal space one by one after forming a frame based on his studies of the rediscovery and relations between space and architecture.