Amado Photography Award Preface: Thelight of our world met at the place where the vestiges of the war were left - K-ARTNOW
Kim Taedong (b.1978) Seoul, Korea

Kim Taedong graduated from Chung-Ang University’s Department of Photography (2007) and obtained a Master’s Degree in Photography from the same graduate school (2013).

Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

The solo exhibition ‘Day Break’ (2011~) shooting people who’ve met by chance in urban spaces at late-night was held at Gallery lux(2012, Seoul, Korea) and Ilwoo Space(2013, Seoul, Korea).

The exhibition held at Amado Art Space(2019, Seoul, Korea) and UARTSPACE(2020, Seoul, Korea) was showcased the series of ‘Rifling’ (2015~), one of the war-related works, and ‘PLANETES’ (2017~) that show consideration of the stars and shaky targets.

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Kim Taedong has participated in a wide range of group exhibitions held at Culture Station Seoul 284(Seoul, Korea), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art(Seoul, Korea), Hara Museum(Tokyo, Japan), Ullens Center for Contemporary Art(Beijing, China), Art Sonje Center(Seoul, Korea), and Buk Seoul Museum of Art(Seoul, Korea).

Awards (Selected)

Kim Taedong was awarded at the 6th Amado Photography Award(Amado Art Space, Korea), the 4th Ilwoo Photography Award(Ilwoo Foundation, Korea),and was selected the final artist of the year of the 4th KT&G SKOPF(KT&G Sangsangmadang, Korea).

Collections (Selected)

His works are in collections of various museums such as Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art(Ansan, Korea), Smith College Museum of Art(Massachusetts, USA), SK Ecoplant(Seoul, Korea), ILWOO Foundation(Seoul, Korea), Australian War Memoria(Canberra, Australia) and the National Museum of Contemporary Art(Gwacheon, Korea).

Originality & Identity

The artist, Kim Taedong, makes an effort to capture extreme situations and the ordinary daily life of the people in an unusual atmosphere. He does not use special materials or subjects for his art. However, he just puts attention to what he sees around in daily life, contemplating how to present the artworks.

He captures various boundary areas like between city centers and the outskirts as well as the time between days and nights. Similarly, he demonstrates the divided border area between North and South Korea or the history between the past and the future. In any kind of place, there exists an uneasy and awkward atmosphere floating on the border. In this state, people always exist like endless stars.

“It is still valid that uniqueness of perspective, even if there is no original photograph itself.
It may be the exact same photograph or a completely different one.”

Kim Taedong has received a lot of attention for his ‘Day Break’ (2011~ ) series, which expresses the strange atmosphere evoked by the urban space at dawn. After midnight the city illuminated only by artificial light becomes a stage different from the lively daytime routine. He wanders around Seoul at nighttime for filming inspiration, selects an appropriate place, and invites passerbies who suddenly appear in his filming and asks them for a pose. The people who come out in his photography are normal people who pass by during his art activities.

In the ‘Day Break’ series, the characters and spaces in the photos form an unbalanced confrontation, and a gap is widened so that unfamiliar tension and discomfort prevent premature understanding. The sleek sense of the perfectly tight confrontation does not deliver any meaning to the audience, but it catches the eye intensely. Even though the people’s poses are fixed, the photos of them seem to look around the city and out of the city with their shimmering eyes making them vivid portraits at night.

In the ‘Rifling’ (2015~ ) series, which Kim Taedong has worked on as part of the DMZ project, he recorded the lives of people in the Gyeongwonseon area and the scars of the Korean war. Once ‘Rifling’ recorded the unknown daily life after the war, the ‘Planetes’ (2017~ ) series poetically documented the quiet podium of the ruins of the war together with the stars in his work. When a photo is taken in line with a setting that tracks the motion of the celestial body, the stationary object vibrates as much as the moving trajectory of the stars, and the moving star stops. The photograph, in which the eternal universe and the traces of finite human beings are taken together, superimposes the countless times of determination on one screen.

In his photographs, there is always an eerie tension, and a slightly nervous mood as if something is about to happen. The image looks like a ghost that suddenly appears and wanders on a still screen while running away or chasing after something. The distance between the audience and the work is also not easy to narrow. This means that the lives of the people are hidden in the photos, standing far away, which leaves keen-sighted people to their own imagination.

Style & Contents

Though pre-preparation is an important task for photographers, trial and error cannot be entirely avoided. However, not only due to Kim Taedong’s sensual pursuit of the image but also because his work is so intuitive that it is difficult to describe the tenacious working plan he had anticipated.

The artist draws his maps or unfolds maps to plan specific travel routes, collects multiple images of destinations, and examines as much information as possible about historical sites. Also, he writes working notes meticulously, and records and organizes the process of filming and results in detail.

However, the determinants which define the working direction come from the visual feeling. The artist follows many inspirations such as many reference images, including works by foreign artists, pre-taken photos, and even from real places. He chases the feeling that he wants to get. It is not a specific work, but an inspiration for what he looks at.
What we can easily overlook due to the strong presence of the characters is that places, not people, are built up in Kim Taedong’s photo. The artist has focused on spaces from the beginning of his works. 〈 Tank 〉 (2007), which photographed an indoor aquarium, 〈 Man-Made 〉 (2008), which contains huge artificially created spaces and 〈 Symetrial 〉 (2010) which filmed the scenery and people of a Korean town, called Flushing, New York. These are a series of captured works found somewhere in space.

“I would like to observe the meaning of the space I live in and what its essence looks like.”

However, when he started working in Flushing also the characters included in his works in the space started to become more important. “As most of the things in the city are for human beings,” he naturally started taking portraits. Also, Kim Taedong says, ‘sometimes a single portrait photo becomes a ‘breakthrough’ showing complex contents and situation at once. The artist’s ceaseless view penetrates deeply into the nature of the city and the people captured by the photograph.

Constancy & Continuity

The artist, Kim Taedong, is a photographer who possesses expressive capabilities basis on a solid filming style. In his new visual experiences, Kim Taedong occupies a distinctive position among the leading contemporary photographers. The artist accurately grasps the space that is the stage of the photo, boldly approaches a stranger or place, and drives the scene in the direction how he wants.

The visualizing power in his photographs’ tense is outstanding. It shows the artist’s technique to capture ‘nothing’ in a straight line and turn it into a scene with a bizarre story in an outstanding mood.

About 10 years ago, some promising artists were selected as ‘outstanding’ at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, at the regular exhibition named 《Young Mosquito 2013》. It reflected the perspective of contemporary art using various art forms and approaches including installations and video art. Among the nine artist participants, Kim Taedong was the only one who worked with purely authentic photography as a medium. It shows the inference of his art and workpieces are established not only in the Korean Photography industry but also in the wholistic transforming art world strongly.

The young writer who made a fresh impact with the representative works 〈 Day Break 〉 and 〈 Break Days 〉 now became a senior-level artist in his middle age (mid-40s). Further, the way he presents his work remains provocative. Hence, it is the ultimate reason why the audience is looking forward to the “new city” that the artist Kim Taedong will show us.

Amado Photography Award Preface: Thelight of our world met at the place where the vestiges of the war were left
Yanghee Shin Curator, Amado Art Space

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.

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Artist_K-Artist Between the Peripheral and the Central 2013.10.31
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