Atta Kim

This is the most comprehensive look to date at the work of Atta Kim, one of Korea’s most distinctive contemporary artists. Born in 1956, Kim uses photography to create dramatic, large-scale works that reflect his fascination with philosophical questions. The “Deconstruction Series” (1992-95) features disconcerting images of seemingly lifeless men and women whose naked bodies are scattered like seeds in open fields and desolate natural settings. In the “Museum Project” (1995-2002), Kim poses people drawn from a wide range of social types in clear acrylic boxes lit like museum vitrines and placed in a variety of urban and natural locations. These images of what he ironically calls “contemporary treasures” provide an unusual perspective on contemporary approaches to sexuality, materialism, politics and religion. For the large-scale, visually spectacular color photographs of the “On-Air Project” (2002 to the present), Kim employed extended exposures—sometimes as long as eight hours—to explore fundamental questions of time and perception. Using such varied subjects as Parliamentary sessions, soccer games, outdoor military exercises and erotic unions, he suggests the ephemerality of human existence, and that it is possible for us to perceive the passage of time in radically different ways. Includes an interview with the artist by ICP curator Christopher Phillips.