Kim Taedong's solo exhibition, 《Planetes》 is an exhibition selected for the 6th Amado Photography Award. In this exhibition, the artist presents a series of < Rifling > and new works of < Planetes >. Both series were inspired by the Real DMZ project, which was launched in 2015. In these two series that seem to be different but somehow connected, the artist captures the history which the war has left behind, the place of daily life, and the light of the distant world beyond it in a strange yet beautiful way.
 
From the series of < Symmetrical >(2010~) and < BreakDay>(2013~), which reveals the characteristics of the places that capture the city but away from the center and people who survives in there, to the series of , which allows anonymous people to coexist with the city's night-site, the artist continued to describe the cityscape he faced or contemporary people. The reason these works preserved some novelty or unfamiliarity is that the artist intentionally paid attention to the surroundings or unusual lifestyles. Since then, the artist has arrived in the area where the Korean War and the division system have been preserved. The journey to the DMZ, a place where the division of the South and the North is starkly divided, maybe natural for the artist, who wanted to capture some conflict arising at the geopolitical position of the city surrounding or the boundary, but on the other hand, it was a new challenge and adventure because it has historical and military significance.
 
The artist goes through a series of the study process, including searching for historical documents and photographic materials to enter the sites. However, when capturing the sites with photos, the artist avoids practical methods such as documentary photography. Therefore, the use of night time as a stage for < Rifling > series follows the way the artist has been done before. What the artist met on the Gyeongwon Line(Dongducheon-Soyosan-Choshengli-HantangRiver-Jeongok-Yeoncheon-Shinkwangri-Sintan-Baekmago) was not the intensity of the war, but the scenery of the rural village. However, these areas were the exploitation paths during the Japanese colonial and the places where bear the scars of the Korean War and some hope of the unification which contains historicity. The artist could not overlook the particularity of these places, so he captures the tension behind the everyday scenery with the silence of the night. Notably, the work < Rifling >, which did not focus on the stars in the night sky, is a bit dramatic in the present, where history and everyday life coexist. The < Rifling > which features scenery of a road created by dawning fog and red-lighted street lights, seems to guide audiences to the unknown world, and the real-life scenes he met on the road, such as military official residence(Rifling-017) and guard post (Rifling-026), also capture some mysterious journeys. The bullet trace left on the ceiling of the historical site of the Waterworks Bureau site(Rifling-005), the crumbling wall of Donducheon old commercial building(Rifling-019), and the village man who met in Shinmang-Ri (Rifling-039), they are the reality but create unrealistic atmosphere. Rather than evoking forgotten history, the artist brings up today's time in a strange way, as if to give mysterious powers to those places.
 
The early works of the series, < Rifling-011 >, is the starting point where the artist has become interested in the night sky stars. He became aware of the contradictory beauty of the night sky stars, unlike the atmosphere of the wet and cold site at the time. That is how the < Planetes> series began. Now there is a curious encounter between the war site and the remaining monument and the night sky stars. The camera's focus will be onthe stars in the sky, and astronomical photography will be studied to fix the stars. As a result, war-related places, which were limited to the DMZ, will be expanded to various parts of the country. Monument and veterans' weapons such as the Incheon Landing Operation Memorial (Planetes-003), the Jangsa  Coast Guard Memorial (Planetes-018), the Dongducheon Peace Museum, the Ganghwado Island Korean War Veterans Memorial Park (Planetes-030) will be the subject oft he photos. Furthermore, the < Planetes Project, AU > which photographed Canberra, Sydney, the Korean War Memorial, will be followed. After a long process, the more stable the positions of the stars, the more blurred and shaky the building or monument on the ground becomes. The Waterworks bureau site(Planetes-001), Seungilgyo (Planetes-014), the Workers' Party (Planetes-004), Daemari Minbuk Village houses (Planetes-005), and various Monumentaries are also in contrast to the bright and vivid stars of the night sky. They show signs of shaking while maintaining some of their original statues, which sit under the twinkling night sky as if they were trying to escape without discerning their historical nature.
 
For the past five years, the artist has visited historic sites related to the Korean War. How to look at the present of those histories has been a question for a long period of time, and it has not defined yet. Through this process, the artist undergoes an emotional change and goes through a process of development. The history and daily lives of those sites, which were the starting point, move to a different level by exposing a staging scene beyond a documentary photograph and then being distracted by the night sky star at one point. Are the night sky stars and war sites inevitable? Maybe it brings back the scars of the past to the aesthetic level. Despite these concerns, the artist reminds us that the Earth is constantly fluctuating by trying to catch the stars in the night sky. He might have seen the simple fact that even a terrible war was created by those who lived in that era and that our lives now continue on that scar. The world which the artist has been captures may be so beautiful to tell the simple truth.
 
Therefore, even though the artist has been visited the war sites, he did not abandon the attitude to capture the city and the people which he has met. The artist neither wants to expose the scars or wounds of history nor intends to reveal any value judgment on historical facts. Instead, he intends to capture the unique scenery he saw at the place he met not as an event or story, but as a strange or conflicting image in the medium of photography, and meet the imagination of the viewer.