Kim In Sook

signed in English, dated 2008 and numbered 10/10 on the reverse, framed by artist

Miki Wick Kim Contemporary Art, Zurich
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Korea, Seoul International Photography Festival, 2008 - 2009 (alternate edition exhibited)
Germany, Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Interieur/Exterieur: Living in Art; From Romantic Interior Painting to the Home Design of the Future, 2008 - 2009 (alternate edition exhibited)

Saturday Night: In Sook Kim, Hatje Cantz Publishers, Ostfildern, Germany, 2009

This work is generally in good condition. Please note that it was not examined under ultraviolet light and out of its frame.
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Revealing the Hidden Lives
Kim In Sook

Shortly after graduating from the internationally renowned Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2006 and joining its cast of impressive alumni including the likes of Candida Hoefer, Andreas Gursky and Sigmar Polke, artist Kim In Sook embarked on her career as one of the foremost Korean conceptual photographers working today. Widely known for capturing actors and models against the dramatically lit and meticulously arranged settings in her photographic works, Kim’s oeuvre frequently explores the multi-faceted relationship between individual and collective emotion and modern societal values. Her most celebrated and intriguing work Saturday Night (Lot 839), which took 3 years to complete, can be considered to be the emblem to the artist’s critical practice.

Born in Pusan, Korea in 1969, Kim In Sook was raised under the conservative framework of the then pre-democratic society. At the age of 26, she underwent a turbulent phase of her life when she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. The subsequent recovery has led her to pick up a camera and travel extensively throughout Asia, Europe, and North America; a moment when she unraveled newfound interest in photography, precisely for its direct and honest expression. This experience has also led her to abandon her career as a computer designer and dive into the realm of visual arts, particularly when she moved to Düsseldorf and studied under famed photographer Thomas Ruff at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2001, at the age of 31.

It was during this period with Ruff when Kim first came into contact with conceptual photography. The drastically different culture she experienced during her time in Germany also became a crucial factor in introducing the themes of voyeurism, power, and sexuality in her works. On her stay in Germany, the artist remarks, “studying there allowed me to freely explore a part of humanity and me that had long been repressed. And studying sexuality helped me understand something that is part of the universal human condition and experience; it helped me understand both how I am like everyone else, and how I am wholly different as well.”¹ It is clear to see that the early works Muses, Die Auktion, and Das Abendessen were already notable to feature the female figure at the center of the composition, and the elaborate staging of the latter two works especially paved the way to the eventual extravagantly planned Saturday Night.

With an emphasis on clear-cut symmetrical composition, from far away the chromogenic print Saturday Night offers a seemingly peaceful panoramic view of the actual Radisson Blue Media Harbour Hotel in Düsseldorf, a hotel that Kim In Sook discovered by accident. The deep blue hue of the sky and the settled white snow in the front garden of the building suggest that the shot was taken just briefly after a night time flurry snowfall. The print can further be divided into the dichotomy of exterior and interior; while the modern exterior façade is guided by a solemn identical square contour of the hotel’s sixty six rooms, the interior is driven by the vibrant eclectic personalities of the inhabitants inside. The crystal clear view of what goes on behind the floor-to-ceiling window in each and every room also reinforces Kim In Sook’s consistent practice of surrendering actors to the gaze and voyeuristic pleasure of the viewer; an aspect that has been compared with Dan Graham’s Time Delay Room 1 (1974) by Markus Bruederlin, the director of Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.

What makes Saturday Night stands apart from Kim’s past works is the scale to which the overall composition took place. Sixty six events that once happened in actual hotel rooms were reenacted by Kim’s friends, colleagues, and neighbors in carefully staged settings. These stories specifically chosen by the artist from newspaper clippings, some of which include sex games, murders, and suicide, are to reflect upon the amplified spectrum of isolation, sexual oppression, and abandonment under the context of 21st century. In fact, the title, according to Kim, is exactly a “sarcastic play on the notion that it is supposed to be ‘family night,’ an idyllic tradition whereby the family comes together to interact.”² Under her keen observation, the hotel, a place of transience and anonymity, has become the most appropriate backdrop for the uncanny juxtaposition of the modern day rituals that span from sadomasochistic acts to binge drinking.

For Bruederlin, when Saturday Night was shown in the exhibition Interieur/Exterieur: Living in Art (2008-2009), among the 140 works by artists such as Zaha Hadid, Marcel Breuer, and Andrea Zittel, it ultimately “became a crystallizing point for many discussions combining art, modern architecture, interior design, and ultimately, urbanism.”³ The transparency of the hotel window in particular serves as a crucial channel to witnessing the modern lives of living in transparent architectures. With sixty six different scenes blatantly played out, rather than focusing on an individual segment, Saturday Night, according to Kim, essentially “chronicle[s] life and our modern human condition”⁴ on a whole.

1 In Sook Kim: Saturday Night, Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2009
2 Lorenzo Dominguez, “Sex, Drugs and How Art Helps Us Understand the Human Condition: An Interview with Artist In Sook Kim”, Examiner.com, 2009
3 Refer to 1
4 Refer to 1