For the Korean-American artist Soo Kim, superimposing photographs onto one another to create new, surreal images is her form of art. She cuts and reconstructs pictures of buildings and cities, and puts them back together to bring out their beautiful, chaotic nature. Her work appears almost otherworldly in its delicate patterns and symmetry, with geometric forms. The pieces suggest motion and continuity, yet are vague enough to defy alignment.
The abstractions she represents capture slices of a fast-moving, lived life which are almost pushed atop each other and fading into one another. However, the layers of buildings that are almost three-dimensional in the way they protrude out of their frames seem far from haphazard. They instead form a balance that transcends ordinary architecture. She strips scenes from around the world to their essence, and offers a critical lens to the cityscapes.
Her works examine reality in their juxtaposition of concrete blocks with nature, the latter of which she often leaves alone while decimating entire stories of skyscrapers. Manipulating and altering photographs by hand, Soo Kim intricately pieces together these buildings and sets them down in their own environment in order to analyse them.
With slab after slab of similar structures, Kim’s settings become familiar and similar to each other in a representation of the monotonous and repetitive. Her stress on this is vividly depicted through a clever use of depth and a spectrum of colours. These bring in elements of activity as well as in her works.
Soo Kim’s perspective on the concrete jungles of the world is fresh, zany, interesting and creative–just the way we like it here at The Yellow Sparrow. She also works with superimposing and reconstruction on the human form, in pieces such as The Angels of the Sky (pictured in gallery above), The Corners of the Sea and others in her ‘Superheavies’ series. Here, she deals with portraits that draw out details as trivial as the texture of skin. Be sure to give these works and others by her a look on the Angles Gallery website.
