04 Apr 2008, Written by Will Petty in art

The Asian Market: Miru Kim

In this Is Greater Than series, we focus on emerging Asian artists, asking contemporaries to explore their roots and share their work. The Asian Market is a celebration of the new guard of a most dominant, relevant, and influential culture.

Miru Kim is nude. The New York-based artist and art consultant is 27 years old this year but looks much younger, like she’d be the ideal insider for Wired‘s Asian Schoolgirl Watch. But such a generalization would discredit Kim, whose artistic interests and photographic output are far from ordinary. Sometimes really far. Sometimes way out at places like the now demolished Revere sugar factory in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where Kim has disrobed and climbed atop a rusted, deconstructed basin, her naked backside balancing over its edge. With a camera across the room on a 20-second timer, she captures the moment on film. In her 2006 art project, Naked City Spleen, she captures it in prose: “Roaming around naked in this haven was a marvelous experience, because I felt so natural and liberated. I had momentarily become one with the sprouting nature that had engulfed the decaying man-made structures.”

The exposed flesh isn’t just what makes Naked City Spleen so impossible to forget. There’s nothing pornographic here, nothing exploitative. The project — which can be seen on Kim’s website — is focused on anatomy; the structure of the city finds the form of the human body. In many of the images, the artist appears as a ghost, a delicate shadow that may not be there at all. In others, she’s a different kind of vision, one with angular bangs and butterscotch skin. Kim’s insertion of a living thing in a ruined world is what makes her work so imaginative. If she were clothed, it wouldn’t work. They’d simply be photos of decay, not images of life. We might even be prompted to suggest, “Why is the photographer in the frame?”

“Images of my body in the photographs appear to impersonate the condition of freedom,” Kim writes at the end of Naked City Spleen, “which is intrinsic to all sentient living beings.”

Raised in Seoul, South Korea, the artist has recently established herself in New York as a provocative new voice. Aside from using Spleen as the catalyst for a new film and performance project this year, Kim founded Naked City Arts, a not-for-profit organization in downtown Manhattan that helps other young artists establish themselves before they can acquire gallery commissions. Kim was also featured in Esquire’s 2007 Best & Brightest issue.

Is Greater Than: Is being an Asian artist something you think about? Does your heritage play a role in how you want to be perceived?

Miru Kim: Not really. I don’t really think about being Asian at all. I mean, there might be a little bit of that. There might be little influences of Eastern religion in my work. That might have something to do with how I am perceived, like it looking religious or something. Buddhist, maybe. I’m not a Buddhist, but people might think that. I grew up learning a lot about Buddhism and Taoism. I grew up with that so those things might come out.

IGT: Are you still shooting yourself?

MK: I’m not shooting myself a lot. Not so much anymore. If it’s a location that’s really hard to get to, I will just take pictures of myself. Recently I was in the sewer in, um, London. And that was really hard to get into. I took a lot of pictures of myself there. I mean, it was a rare opportunity. I had to do it. But I’m pretty much done with the series now, the series of photos. I mean, I don’t want to say I’m done done, but it is pretty much complete and I want to start working on other things.

IGT: What kinds of things?

MK: I just finished a film. It’s a film about the photos and the series. So I am in the process now of editing it and submitting it to film festivals and things like that. But there are lots of other projects I want to be doing. I am working on a performance project right now too. There are other people, there is another person working on it with me. It’s a collaborative project, I mean. I’m doing a play and we want to perform it in one of the spaces. It might be in one of the spaces where I shot some photos or at least in a similar sort of location. The project is starting soon.

I also want to do more collage work and more painting work. I went to school for painting. But I will always be coming back to photography. I don’t ever think of myself as a photographer, but it’s one of the medias I use and I’ll always come back to it.

IGT: How has New York’s decay changed your view of the city?

MK: I love New York more because of the decomposition. It gives it more character and more dimension. Yeah, I like it more. I mean, if the entire city looked like it does in some parts [laughs], if the whole city was dilapidated, then I probably wouldn’t enjoy it. I’d probably hate it.

IGT: Where are you going with your art? Do you think about that?

MK: I don’t know. I’m going with the flow right now. [Laughs.] We’ll see what happens, you know. [Laughs.] Actually, one of the reasons I started doing what I’m doing, one of the reasons I started the series, was because I wanted to go on adventures. I like adventures.

But I’m not really an urban explorer. I think it would be unfair to call myself an urban explorer. I don’t do it so much. I have friends who go out and explore much more than I do and really get into the scene and everything.

IGT: So where are you at right now?

MK: I’m actually at Petco right now. [Laughs.] I’m buying rat food. I have two pet rats at home. Actually that’s one of the reasons I started doing this, the series and everything. I like rats. I actually don’t see them that often though. I don’t see them in the subway tunnels that much or anything. I haven’t seen many. I see them more on the platforms.

Actually, one of the ways the series got started was because I was trying to take a picture of a rat on one of the platforms and then it started to go in the subway tunnel. So I just started following it. But then I found out that, um, the city doesn’t really want you to do that. They don’t like you to go in the tunnels. But then I come across some other people who were going into the tunnels all the time. So I started doing it again. And that’s how I kind of got into this whole thing. It was kind of on accident.

Will Petty is the associate editor of West Suburban Living Magazine and the managing editor of The Insider, a monthly arts and entertainment tabloid serving suburban Chicago. He is a regular contributor to The Onion A.V. Club. Currently, he is working on a collection of short stories and a collection of short short stories.

View all articles by Will Petty.