Installation view of 'Dropping to the Surface' ⓒKim Kyoungtae
The first solo exhibition ‘Dropping to the Surface’ of Kim Kyoungtae, who has built his own world of photography through the placid and homogeneous images of planes, opened at the exhibition hall Whistle from 17 May to 22 June. Kim, who has been converting three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional planes via the focus stacking method, chose cubes as the subject for this exhibition. This scale cube, which is 1cm-long on all sides, is also an object that was used as the standard unit for measuring the size and direction of asteroids at NASA. As Kim said, cubes which ‘by themselves can act as a measurement of size and also influence perspective in terms of their final form’ are presented in flat images of various sizes taken from slightly different perspectives at the exhibition hall. The actual three-dimensional, small, and smooth cube placed at the entrance of the exhibition hall was presented as a series of two-dimensional homogeneous photos, which were taken by having the camera’s focal point draw gradually closer to the subject and automatically combining those parts that are in focus to lose the vanishing point. What is noticeable is that, from this flat and expanded photo of a cube, one becomes able to virtually experience the surface texture that was visually imperceptible. This unrealistic texture is especially pronounced in the work ‘Scale Cube 1P’, which features a cropped photo of a cube. Thinking back on what the artist had said - that ‘focus stacking is similar to how the various aspects of an object perceived by the eye are cognized as a single object by the brain’ - it seems that the exhibition ‘Dropping to the Surface’ would help us to be able to approach the things around us and to better understand their essence.
Yoon Wonhwa, a researcher of visual culture, wrote in her book Drawing Window Mirror (Vostok Press) that ‘through a vibrant dynamism expresses the spatial depth of being drawn into the vanishing point by the use of perspective distortion, Kim’s photos lie on the antipode of the photos that almost seem to create a virtual sound effect’. She added that ‘as an architectural photographer with a background in graphic design, the planal character of his photos is not limited to three-dimensional models and has the potential to either move or expand to other dimensions’.
Kim majored in visual communication design at Chungang University and finished his art direction degree at Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne in Switzerland. He participated in exhibitions such as ‘Graphic Design, 2005~2015, Seoul’ (Ilmin Museum of Art, 2016), ‘No Longer Objects’ (Seoul Museum of Art, 2016), ‘Papers and Concrete’ (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, 2016), and ‘Specters of the State Avant-Garde’ (Venice Biennale, 2018), and has also put together photography collections such as ‘On’ (YOUR MIND, 2013), ‘Cath’ (mediabus, 2014), and ‘Angles’ (pressroom, 2016). <by Park Semi>