Flowing Earth
Young Kyung Kim
Self-Published
Softcover
150 x 211 mm
36 pages
2020
The second part of Flowing Earth examines the mobility of life and the image through a fictional archaeological narrative and the visual form known as lazography. This work explores both the transformation of life revealed by excavating the strata of an era and the ontological changes encountered in photography through delving into the surface-level strata of the image. The act of excavation serves as a way of figuratively revealing the contemporary discourse of image formation, as the project’s juxtaposition of the earth’s strata with the image’s strata shapes a narrative of shifting and transforming land. This second part imagines an era where farmers have disappeared. Through a fictional archaeological narrative of excavating ruins, it reveals a post-labour world. The unearthed uniforms and tools become relics that attest to the emptiness of a world from which work has vanished. The virtual excavation is an act of re-mediation that brings reality in contact with what is poised to disappear. It is an act of both delving into the past and opening up the future. As the traces of vanished labour invoke the past, they are also presented as attempts to hasten the confrontation with a post-transformation era.
Simultaneously, the excavation structure functions as a metaphorical representation of the photography medium’s way of being. Progressing from the initial image rooted in indexical characteristics to the middle section’s straight, staged, and discovered photographs and lazography—and from there to the last section’s AI-generated images—the photograph shifts from a single recording medium to a relational assemblage and a way of being that uses deposits of data to shape reality. Here, the role of the photographs in the first section (From Earth) becomes that of a historical resource for the second. The site undergoing excavation is not actual land—it is produced out of paper clay and staged like an excavation site in the studio, where it is captured in photographs. The site subsequently operates as a support structure where the photographs are developed. The work Paper Stratum materially represents the structure of a transformation from one support structure (the earth) to another (the image). In the moment when we become aware that the excavation site consisted of paper, the boundary between land and image breaks down, and everything is shown to be a world constructed through images.
(Source: https://www.youngkim.co.kr/flowing-earth)
About the Artist
Young Kyung Kim is a photography artist who has been working since 2012. She has taken part of many group and solo exhibitions and has curated three shows from 2023 to 2025.
https://www.youngkim.co.kr
