Atta Kim

Water Does Not Soak in Rain surveys 25 years of works from the internationally-acclaimed South Korean photographer Atta Kim. Since the mid-1980s, Kim (born 1956) has evolved and practiced a singular life-philosophy through a personal synthesis of the teachings of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff and Zen Buddhism. The works that Kim produced after ten years of formal training in these teachings--which include his series In der-Welt-sein (1991), Deconstruction (1995) and The Museum Project (1995-2002), in which he created a private museum by placing figures in Plexiglas boxes--are described by him as "byproducts" or expressions of this Weltanschauung. The guiding motto or aphorism of the On-Air project is simply this: "all things eventually disappear." Kim's most recent series compresses 10,000 images of a city into one image, and represents the project's culmination.

Atta Kim is one of South Korea's best-known photographers. Begun in 2002, his On-Air project, which includes the series After Monologue of Ice and Superimposition, is an exploration of duration and simultaneity through the use of long exposures. This monograph looks at Eight Hours, his third body of work to deploy this conceit, which consists of images taken over a period of eight hours, on eight-by-ten-inch film. Explaining this constraint, Kim said in a 2006 interview, "the length of time that you can photograph with natural light within a day is almost eight hours. And Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used an eight-hour exposure when he made some of the first photographs in the 1820s." Shooting a variety of scenes in New York, China, India, Prague, Berlin and Paris, Kim has used the long exposure time to create haunting, beautiful images of transience inspired by anica, the Buddhist term for the impermanence of existence. Kim's view of New York's Times Square, for instance, reveals a cityscape seemingly vacant of people and cars, in which every moving thing exists as a blurred, almost imperceptible trace.

In The Museum Project, Korean photographer Atta Kim commandeers average scenes--city streets, department stores, freight depots and forests--and turns them into exhibition spaces. On display are people crammed into acrylic boxes, stacked in sets, on end, or sometimes alone. In selecting his subjects and isolating them in their boxes, Kim aims to “detach them from reality; to display and deconstruct at the same time my own concept of the world.” Kim compares his efforts to that of an archaeologist, sifting through the cultural strata in order to unearth and hold up exemplary objects for our contemplation. The Museum Project is comprised of a number of series, such as War Memorial, Sex, Suicide, and other human typologies, each intended to highlight a particular mode of behavior or belief. In certain series, the subjects are isolated from their natural settings, each display case simply framed and offset by backdrops in primary colors. The resulting images are curious and startling, straddling the indeterminate ground between performance, photography, and an alternate form of anthropology. “The subject of history is, finally, nothing but human beings,” Kim says. “[The] great order of... the cosmos is that all kinds of acts conducted by human beings are always watched by someone.” Atta Kim was born in Korea in 1956. He graduated from Changwon University with a Bachelor of Science degree and has been actively photographing since the mid-1980s. He has had solo shows at the Samsung Photo Gallery, Seoul; the Nikon Salon Gallery, Tokyo; the Yechong Gallery, Seoul; and has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including shows at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago; The Odens Foto Triennale in Odens, Denmark; the Australian Centre for Photography; the twenty-fifth Sao Paolo Bienal; and FotoFest in Houston.