In Sook Kim
As a visual artist for whom photography is only one of several mediums she works in, In Sook Kim has a great emotional passion for seeing. In fact, the act of seeing is her forte. Her gaze is so consuming that she calls herself more an observer than an artist: "I don't interpret or criticise, I see." In her photographs, the notion of "seeing one's subject better than one depicts it" might even be called the guiding artistic principle.
Her work evolves in three ways: from found computer-enhanced data, from extravagantly staged shoots like those arranged for the photographs Das Abendessen (The Dinner) and The Auction, and from what has been called her "demonic" study of the female body.
Regardless of what generates her work, In Sook Kim imparts to her viewers a world in which people appear as the roles they play and not necessarily as the people they really are.
Her Rooms series—a collection of staged photographs showing the interiors of rooms within a building on a Saturday night—show photographs of people and the rooms they inhabit. In the viewing process, these human subjects become both the seen and the seers (literally: voyeurs).
Yet these works do more then fulfill the guilty pleasure of the voyeur. Her photographs stretch from questioning what people desire to celebrating what makes them endure and stalk loneliness; it charts a "social" distance between the perimeters of eroticism and the depths of urban isolation. Less important are the people that are shown, but more so the role they are playing within the picture, and the provocative ways in which they respond to the loneliness subtly suggested throughout Kim’s pictures.