Review: Atta Kim ON AIR

Atta Kim - ON AIR

The Buddhist understanding of the world is that it is not a place full of things, a place of people and animals, cars and buildings, continents and oceans.  It is rather a world of processes, of coming into and out of being, arising and passing, waves and vibration.  It is a world of cause and effect, each effect becoming a cause, each cause an effect, the whole of the world interconnected and interpenetrated.

We have a similar understanding of the world from modern science, but the Buddha first taught these ideas 2500 years ago.  His insights came from meditation.  What he understood is that we are fooled into believing things are real because we process sensory data at a far slower rate than it occurs.  So it appears to us that something remains stable and fixed when it is actually in rapid flux.  A classic example within the tradition is the candle flame.  In the morning it appears the same as the one that was first lit the previous evening.  In reality, that flame is not the same as it was an hour ago, a minute ago, even one second ago.  The flame arises and passes away far faster than the eye can see.

And so it is the same for what we call human beings.  We image ourselves as somehow solid and fixed, but we are changing not just day to day, but not just hour to hour or minute to minute, but micro-moment to micro-moment.    

Korean photographer Atta Kim captures this transistoriness in a series of long-exposures of urban landmarks, from Times Square to the Tiananmen Square.  Typical photos of such places depict the crawl of motorized traffic and milling throngs of human beings.  But by keeping his shutter open for a number of hours, Atta succeeds in depicting the flow of human bodies and metal conveyances as wispy trails of smoke punctuated by tiny pricks of light.  Perhaps no other photographs succeed so well in speeding up time, in showing us how we look from the perspective of a viewer for whom a day is but a second. 

Kim has been exhibiting since the late 1980’s and this small article makes no attempt to review his life’s work, only to bring to the attention of those who might be interested powerfully moving images that convey a sense of the reality of our existence. 

For more on this series, see Atta’s website, and follow the links:  Gallery – ON AIR – Long Exposure.

 

A 2006 NY Times review can be found here.

And a Wiki article with biographical background can be found here.

#