6 Things for What Else They Are Lesley A. Martin

“When I looked at things for what they Are, I was fool enough to persist in my folly and found that each photograph was a mirror of my Self. So I turned 180 degrees and looked the opposite way at things for what Else they are. . . . But I also learned that while camera records superbly, it transforms better! Camera transforms so successfully that, among other things, what Else things are is a photograph! Then I finally admitted that the documentary photograph, the literal image, is the ultimate illusion, the hopeless illusion, the dangerous illusion because the documentary per- petrates the illusion that life itself is the only reality.” —Minor White, from Mirror, Messages, Manifestations 1

“Photography was of course invented as a way of recording and reproducing certain events. However, this primary function has prevailed for too long. We have been preoccupied only with the things we can see. . . . We need a new paradigm of photography. . . . We have tended to pay attention only to the photographed object itself, not to its background. How- ever, I want to convey not only the object itself but also the story behind it through my photographs. That is the essence of my work. I always think of how I can convey the qualities of abstraction and inner energy that photography can suggest so effectively.” —Atta Kim, from Atta Kim: ON-AIR 2

It’s interesting to ponder what Minor White would think of Atta Kim’s work, not to mention Atta Kim’s conscious citation of White as one of his predecessors. To my thinking, White—who frequently referenced Buddhist koans, considered D.T. Suzuki’s Zen and the Art of Archery to be de rigueur reading for photographers, and even fashioned himself into the pseudonymous Chinese poet Sam Tung Wu in the early pages of Aperture magazine—would no doubt feel pleased, and perhaps even a bit vindicated. Superficially, the photographic output of Minor White and Atta Kim could scarcely be more different—White’s work consisting of small, black-and-white prints and frequently focused on isolated natural details full of symbolic portent; Kim’s most recent work consisting of large-scale color prints, primarily urban landscapes, or staged processes such as melting ice. Yet how satisfyingly karmic it is that, thirty years after White’s death, Atta Kim, a contemporary Korean artist, has picked up where he left off philosophically, finding influence in the writings of G.I. Gurdjieff, Zen philosophy, and the sense that a true consciousness of the world and its twin qualities of beauty and impermanence can best be attained through the lens of the camera. In the preface to the 1982 reissue of Minor White’s book Mirrors, Messages, and Manifestations, a quote taken from one of his unpublished manuscripts asserts that “Consciousness in photography comes out of an awakening to the interlocking interconnectedness of everything, from atoms to suns, space to time, light to dark, event to situation, man to Man, and Man to God.”3 In writings about the larger ON-AIR Project as a whole, Atta Kim has described it as an exploration “based on [his] conviction that natural things and history in the universe are interrelated without excep- tion.”4 Throughout his work, Atta Kim consistently interrogates our mutual connectedness as human beings. A project like The Self-Portrait Series, in which one hundred photos of individuals from one hundred different countries are digitally combined into a single portrait, is just one clear example of his pursuit of these larger questions of human consciousness: What is the nature of our collective existence? How are we different—are we differ- ent one from the other? What will become of us or of ourselves and of our efforts to shape the world around us? Throughout his work one senses a

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The Museum Project #050, The People Series, 1998

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coolly analytical impulse, as though each photographic undertaking were a series of proofs of various Buddhist precepts. And while Kim has been careful to stipulate that he does not want his work to be interpreted as mere illustrations of Buddhist concepts, he continually frames the content of the work as a means for analyzing the world via a clear and self-conscious Eastern perspective. One of his earliest series documented 150 Korean shamans designated as “Human Cultural Assets” by the Korean government; in his series titled Deconstruction, human figures lie strewn across desolate landscapes, signifying a desire for both physical and spiritual evolution. (Atta Kim calls the bodies “seeds.”) In The Museum Project, various human typologies of Korean culture, from prostitutes to war veterans, are displayed in Plexiglas cases for the viewers’ consideration— according to Atta Kim, a means of visually epitomizing the idea that “all objects have their own raison d’être.”5 For Atta Kim, the key phrase describing his work, in particular The ON-AIR Project, is stark—a dark assurance that “all things eventually, however, disappear.” This promised disappearance manifests itself as the shimmer of impermanence, captured time and again throughout the ON- AIR series.6 It is particularly apparent in this collection of images shot in the busiest of busy urban sites around the world— in New York (#110-2), the Champs Élysées in (#210-4), Nanjing Road in (#150-28), among others. In these images, any trace of individual hu- man presence has melted into a collective hum. From city to city, the passage of time is made palpable, as is the sense of the ephemerality of human existence. The accumulated traces of prior human effort remain—palaces, monuments, and historic buildings; futuristic-looking towers from recent building booms; traffic lights, roads, and neon signs—but one senses that these, too, are just the next wave away from their own disintegration. Each of these images was shot over the course of an eight-hour exposure in various cities throughout the world—namely, New York, Ber- lin, , Paris, New , , Shanghai, and other sites in China. Why eight hours, one might ask. In an interview with Christopher Phillips, curator of an extensive 2006 show of this work at the International Center of Photography in New York, Atta Kim explains that “the length of time that you can photograph with natural light within a day is almost eight hours. And Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used an eight-hour exposure when he made some of the first photographs in the 1820s.”7 He goes on to explain that in his earlier series In-der-Welt-sein, he chose to photograph from three to five a.m., the time during which, according to Buddhism, the world was created and Buddha achieved spiritual enlightenment. In other words—these time frames represent periods of consciousness of one kind or another. In Godfrey Reggio’s classic filmKoyaanisqatsi , time-lapse photography is used to heighten a sense of “life out of balance,” and to draw out what the filmmakers see as the “collision of two different worlds—urban life and technology versus the environment.” While it is easy to locate a shared vocabulary in the pulsing blur of humanity that animates various cities throughout the world in both works, there is a key difference between the film’s concern that technology will impoverish humanity and Atta Kim’s belief, as described inWater Does Not Soak in Rain, a collection of Atta Kim’s poetry, snippets of remembrances, theories, and koans published in 2008: “The notion of nature in the twenty-first century has evolved.” Going further, he states, “Cities are flowers of man’s evolution. Finally, nature has evolved into cities.”8 In his eyes, technology and humans are not in opposition with one another, rather technology—“the accumulation of a new form of human consciousness”9—is an inextricable part of human evolution. This is not to be confused with a belief in the inherent progression of humankind toward a utopian outcome, technological or otherwise. Indeed, as he states, “Whether this consequence of human evolution is tragic or apocalyptic is a separate issue.”10 There is a coolness in this, from one perspective. From another, it is merely a sense of the acceptance of the larger cycles of the universe, beyond human apprehension. In an in- terview with the New York-based independent curator Inhee Iris Moon, Atta Kim further goes on to explain that “the disappearance in my ON-AIR

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The Museum Project #076, The War Veteran Series, 1999

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Project does not represent the negative phenomena of disappearance, but ironically confirms the value of existence through disappearance.” While visually enacting the eventual disappearance of the humans pulsing through each site photographed, the EIGHTHOURS series also represents a melding of all things into one. “Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form” according to the Heart Sutra,11 one of Buddhism’s principle scriptures. Or, in Atta Kim’s interpretation, “emptiness is the accumulation of countless things.”12 It is this very emptiness that animates and illuminates each image in ATTA KIM: EIGHTHOURS. There are many ways one could praise the ineffably palpable sense of humanity become pure energy and light in Kim’s images, but it seems appropriate to invoke Minor White’s words—speaking over thirty years ago, and worlds away, yet somehow wholly fitting: “ ‘It is beautiful! It is beautiful!’ A phrase that has no meaning other than it is the words that come to my lips when some aspect of the visual world is so charged with meaning that you are at a loss what to do or say. These moments when the visual world is transparent; when the intan- gible is more solid than steel.”13

—Lesley A. Martin is publisher of Aperture Foundation, New York.

Notes: 1 Minor White, Mirror, Messages, and Manifestations (New York, 1966), p. 95. 2 Atta Kim interview with Christopher Phillips, in Atta Kim: ON-AIR, exh. cat. International Center of Photography (New York and Göttingen, 2006), pp. 21–22. 3 White (see note 1), p. 3. 4 Atta Kim, “ON-AIR Project—artist statement” (unpublished, 2006). 5 Ibid. 6 Atta Kim’s ON-AIR Project is a large, on-going body of work—an umbrella term for several series in which long exposures of two, six, eight, and twenty-five hours are the primary technical strategy in creating the work. Subjects include landscapes such as the DMZ between North and , the National Assembly of South Korea, various cities around the world, as well as events such as a silkworm eating mulberry leaves and a couple having sex. 7 Atta Kim, “Q & A for the Indala series,” unedited transcription (unpublished, 2008). 8 Atta Kim, Water Does Not Soak in Rain (, 2008). 9 Atta Kim, unpublished e-mail correspondence with the author, December 8, 2008. 10 Kim (see note 7). 11 Edward Conze et al., eds., Buddhist Texts through the Ages (Whitefish, MT, 2006), p. 152. 12 Kim (see note 7). 13 Minor White quoted in James Baker Hall, ed., Rites and Rituals (New York, 1978), p. 95.

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