Atta Kim Knihy

Water Does Not Soak in Rain surveys 25 years of works from the internationally-acclaimed South Korean photographer Atta Kim. Since the mid-1980s, Kim (born 1956) has evolved and practiced a singular life-philosophy through a personal synthesis of the teachings of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff and Zen Buddhism. The works that Kim produced after ten years of formal training in these teachings--which include his series In der-Welt-sein (1991), Deconstruction (1995) and The Museum Project (1995-2002), in which he created a private museum by placing figures in Plexiglas boxes--are described by him as "byproducts" or expressions of this Weltanschauung . The guiding motto or aphorism of the On-Air project is simply "all things eventually disappear." Kim's most recent series compresses 10,000 images of a city into one image, and represents the project's culmination.

Atta Kim is one of South Korea's best-known photographers. Begun in 2002, his "On-Air" project, which includes the series "After Monologue of Ice" and "Superimposition," is an exploration of duration and simultaneity through the use of long exposures. This monograph looks at "Eight Hours," his third body of work to deploy this conceit, which consists of images taken over a period of eight hours, on eight-by-ten-inch film. Explaining this constraint, Kim said in a 2006 interview, "the length of time that you can photograph with natural light within a day is almost eight hours. And Joseph Nicephore Niepce used an eight-hour exposure when he made some of the first photographs in the 1820s." Shooting a variety of scenes in New York, China, India, Prague, Berlin and Paris, Kim has used the long exposure time to create haunting, beautiful images of transience inspired by "anica," the Buddhist term for the impermanence of existence. Kim's view of New York's Times Square, for instance, reveals a cityscape seemingly vacant of people and cars, in which every moving thing exists as a blurred, almost imperceptible trace.