Destiny, Photography as Appropriation of the World
Matthias Harder
food half cold or an ashtray on a windowsill – we ordinarily do not take
intense note of such situations or objects; their symbolic content is often overlooked.
When, in accordance with a Buddhist tradition, a photographer says a prayer of
thanks for a meal, when he “does homage” to a given situation by spontaneously
taking a photograph of a magazine, which happens to be opened to a fashion advertisement,
it is something unusual, something that raises questions, questions for the artist
and his images.
Lim Young Kyun photographs things familiar to us all. He visualizes normal sights
through everyday photographs. He takes a look at empty plates and window displays
or from window into a garden. Lim combines different genres, the portrait, the
still life, and an approach to image-making which calls to mind the life- or
street-photography of the sixties and seventies. And recently he has expanded
his photographic works to include video installations, as in the Bhak Gallery
in Seoul for example, with a minimalist work with sixteen monitors about his
artist colleague and friend Nam June Paik.
Here, older and
more recent works featuring situations he has observed and experienced are now
brought together from various locations in his native Korea and his chosen homeland,
the USA, also from Osaka, Prague, Paris, and even a Nepalese base camp in the
Himalayas. Inspired by his first teacher, Tae-Han Kim, who also recommended to
work with abstract compositions, his earliest works date from the mid-seventies,
when he was a student in Taegu. The latest works in this book are from Germany.
Lim is a religious, practicing Buddhist. He visits a Buddhist monastery in Seoul
regularly, in order to reaffirm for himself the power of desire-less-ness. Lim
also meditates with his photography students and photographs them as they concentrate
on his most inner depths. He always carries a biography of the Buddha with him;
it sometimes appears within the field of view of his camera, for example on the
table of a lodging house in Pokhara during an ascent to the Himalayas. The next
photograph of the same location focuses on his sketchbook as a motif, an image
of the same table with the objects slightly rearranged, and the book, now open,
shows the drawing of a massive mountain. As he climbs on, he reaches a tiny hotel
which is not heated and where he is the only guest at this moment; but the pillow
in this drafty, ice-cold room promises “with love”.
His images are
thus sketches from a personal story, scraps of thought, memories, but also “Everyday-Stories”
or “Daily-life-Landscapes”, as Lim himself titles the photographs.
And if one watches the photographer at his work, as I did in the North German
city of Glückstadt, the words Lim uses for his way of appropriating the
world through photography become manifested: “relaxing”, “pleasure”,
and “joy”.
The melancholy
of his images betrays something about the photographer’s reasons for searching
out and capturing certain motifs. It is the solitude, a loneliness, particularly
when Lim uses himself as a subject, whether it is his eye photographed from his
outstretched arm with the camera turned on him, or the numerous self-portraits
reflected in store windows, which can be recognized when one has deciphered the
reflection on the glass surface amidst the items on display. This affirms a formal
proximity to his Japanese colleague, Daido Moriyama, who grants everything he
encounters “equal value in terms of cognition and validation”. Thus,
Lim is also closely related to him in terms of content.
A few of Lim’s photographs show a boy playing in a barren setting: alone
on an empty square in the New York neighbourhood of Queens, a view from a rainy
window onto the sea, or an empty escalator in a subway station in Seoul. As in
this last photograph, sometimes pictograms, internationally understood, communicate
with us as viewers.
An early photo of this series: four traffic signs, taken in 1976 in Seoul, give
warning to drive slowly through a construction site. The sign to the left is
already weather-beaten, and its text is barely visible. The right sign, brand
new, has just been erected; it commands simply to “Stop”. The directional
signs appear to have been there for a very long time, and they bear witness to
a construction site which seems to have lasted almost an eternity, perhaps a
gentle reminder of the cultural and economic stagnation in his homeland. These
are the kind of documentations that become poetic symbols.
His former teacher
from Busan, a Professor Limb, wrote him a dedication on a piece of rice paper:
“be patient” and then repeated the calligraphic characters several
times. Then at another spot he added “work hard”, a later motto of
his student. Another motto is: “photography as karma”. Lim’s photograph
of the winding stone stairwell in a building by Antonio Gaudi in Barcelona symbolizes
the constant and strongly linked opposites of light and shadow, above and below,
beginning and end, such as the Ying and Yang symbol.
Today Lim travels back and forth between Seoul, where he has been teaching Photography
since 1992 at the Chung-Ang University, and New York, where he teaches the same
subject with an emphasis on portraiture at New York University. Numerous invitations
to speak or vacation trips to Japan and Europe add to his travels. When Lim is
on the road, he constantly works on new ideas for photographs. The situations
he encounters inspire him: he photographs people in cafes, at bus stops, or at
a rainy airport. He does not stage any of these situations, and thus travelling
itself remains his motif. “As a novelist is never without a pen,” so
Lim also always carries two Leicas with him. He believes that situations and
moments, segments of an eternal order, can always become a means of spiritualization,
a meditation.
Hardly a single
individual shown in this series of images is characterized as an individual person,
as in his conceptual, systematic portrait work of his students or his artist
colleagues, which he pursues seriously at the same time. In the spontaneous situations
portrayed people serve only as extras in a scene much like a stage set. A passing
glance, fast and unfiltered. Months or years after the photograph has been taken
the images are accepted or rejected for an exhibition or publication. As a testimony
to a moment, an image he selects must also be verifiable and palpable in the
present.
Sometimes we discover
concrete or hidden references to earlier, famous colleagues. He named his portrait
series “The Face of our Time” in reference to August Sander. In a photograph
taken in Prague a book by the Czech photographer, Josef Koudelka lies on a windowsill
between his own open notebook and passport. A view from a window into a garden
with the remains of an old tree also calls to mind the late works of another
great master of Czech photographic history, Josef Sudek.
Today, a self-portrait shot into a mirroring glass window on the ferry from Manhattan
to Staten Island shows the view back to the metropolis skyline and evokes the
missing Twin Towers, even if Lim almost seems to fill the gap with his dark silhouette.
After the attack on the World Trade Center Lim was in New York several times
for extended periods and repeatedly photographed the direct and indirect consequences
of the destruction, stories about changes to a wounded city.
In the display
window of an antique shop in the Westphalian city of Münster is a faded
group portrait, probably taken at the beginning of the 20th century, of a middle-class
German family. Here, Lim’s self reflection overlays the group picture, (a
reflection of his own self), the mirror of a family conveyed as his own through
his photographic appropriation – “Destiny”.
For Lim each photograph is a narration. We can read and understand many, whether
we live in Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul, Buenos Aires, or New York. Others remain puzzling
and culturally rooted. Nevertheless, we still feel enriched through Lim’s
poetry of the ordinary.
Dr. Matthias Harder
Chairman Palais für aktuelle Kunst | Kunstverein Glückstadt
