International Center of Photography

Atta Kim

"This publication surveys the remarkable photographic work of the Korean artist Atta Kim. Notable for their cinematic scale, dramatic composition, and meticulous technical quality, his photographs count among the most high-impact works to be found anywhere. But their visual seductiveness is ultimately a kind of lure, which the artist employs to draw viewers into unfamiliar realms of speculative thought." "The present book provides a comprehensive overview of Atta Kim's photographs since the mid-1980s, with special emphasis on his current ON-AIR Project. In the ON-AIR photographs, the artist employs extremely long exposures, sometimes lasting as long as twenty-four hours, to create works that explore fundamental questions of time and perception. Through highly unconventional images of such varied subjects as erotic coupling, the militarized landscape along the Korean DMZ, and the seemingly deserted midday precincts of Times Square, he suggests that it is possible for us to imagine duration in ways that are radically different from our everyday experience. In a wide-ranging interview that appears in this volume, Atta Kim explains how such photographic works have arisen from his long-term engagement with philosophical, spiritual, and technological questions."--BOOK JACKET.

On-air

Water Does Not Soak in Rain surveys 25 years of works from the internationally-acclaimed South Korean photographer Atta Kim. Since the mid-1980s, Kim (born 1956) has evolved and practiced a singular life-philosophy through a personal synthesis of the teachings of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff and Zen Buddhism. The works that Kim produced after ten years of formal training in these teachings--which include his series In der-Welt-sein (1991), Deconstruction (1995) and The Museum Project (1995-2002), in which he created a private museum by placing figures in Plexiglas boxes--are described by him as "byproducts" or expressions of this Weltanschauung. The guiding motto or aphorism of the On-Air project is simply this: "all things eventually disappear." Kim's most recent series compresses 10,000 images of a city into one image, and represents the project's culmination.

Atta Kim

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