The poet William Carlos Williams once wrote about Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1558): “Sweating in the sun / that melted the wings’ wax—”, “Off the coast / there was / a splash quite unnoticed—this was / Icarus drowning.”

 

A farmer plowing on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean, a shepherd tending sheep, a fisherman casting a line by the shore—none pay any attention to the fall of the winged boy. Bruegel, like the poet, is not interested in the myth itself, but in the reality of ordinary lives. In the Flanders region where Bruegel lived, there’s a proverb: “Even when someone dies, the plough must go on.” A fitting portrait of a harsh era, where survival left little room for sentiment. By the late 15th century, as the medieval twilight faded, Flemish painters began breaking free from religious iconography to look squarely at human life. Like Daedalus’s warning to Icarus, Bruegel’s painting views the world not from an exalted height, but from a grounded, balanced perspective.

 

The photographic portfolio by young artist Seunggu Kim, spotlighted by Museum Hanmi this year, seems to echo Icarus’s flight. Like Daedalus, Kim surveys a labyrinthine world from above. But unlike the reckless Icarus, he honors the paths and methods pioneered by his mentors. In this digital age, he lugs a large-format film camera and tripod like relics of a bygone era. His youthful ambition fuels a journey toward uncharted realms—places no one has yet reached. His flight is strenuous. Kim is flying against a tide of high-resolution satellite imagery and crow-sized drones capturing the earth in jagged lines from every angle. And yet, there remain images in the human world that only a human can take.

 

His latest photographic path takes him to a hillside in Hadong, South Gyeongsang Province. It is a vantage point where manmade coal-fired power plants, national industrial complexes, and the natural landscape intersect. Here, Kim has set up his own “Observation Station.” In his logbook, he wrote the following goal: “I hope to confront, in full, the 'atmosphere' and the 'invisible materials' within it that have been treated merely as 'background' in all landscape photography so far. I hope to witness the 'changes' brought by them, and thus our 'reality.'”

 

His method: observe the same location repeatedly over long periods; divide the day into time zones for observation; record the air quality index (AQI) at each moment of shooting.

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What were the “invisible materials” that his camera caught in the series Hadong Observation Station? The Hadong Power Plant, the industrial complexes of Yeosu and Gwangyang, and the Hallyeohaesang coastal area are not the main subjects. They serve merely as reference points, silhouettes. What Kim tries to capture on film are the unseen substances filling the space between his observation post and these distant objects—materials perceptible not through the human retina, but through the silver grains of film. One logbook entry reads: “In the image captured on film, I saw ‘white earth’ touching ‘black sky,’ and ‘black smoke’ merging into ‘black clouds’.”

 

But perhaps the quotation marks are misplaced. Rather than around "black smoke," they should surround “merging” and “touching,” if we are to clearly understand the artist's intended focus. Kim seeks to render the interaction between humans and their environment in a visible form.

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In previous series like Better Days, Bam Islet, Riverside, and Jingyeong Sansu, Kim explored human-environment relations through the urban lens. These are the very “concrete jungles” that designer Haechun Park dubbed “concrete utopias,” and rapper Jay-Z described in his lyrics. In Jingyeong Sansu, apartment buildings mimic the contours of Korea’s sacred mountains. In Riverside, we see concrete embankments become the stage for bizarre urban spectacles during floods. Few Seoul citizens know that Bam Islet, now a bird sanctuary, once had human inhabitants. It was blown up in a 1970 demolition to provide rocks for constructing Yeouido’s levees. Better Days shows how sand beaches once bustling with river bathers have given way to cemented swimming pools. Faux theme parks and festivals forcibly inserted into cityscapes continue to appear throughout Kim’s works.

 

Though the thematic focus remains consistent—human-environment interaction—Kim’s point of view has evolved. In Jingyeong Sansu, he walks the city like a flâneur, capturing what he encounters at eye level. In Bam Islet and Riverside, he occasionally ascends, reaching the altitude of seagulls gliding above the Han River. By Better Days, this bird’s-eye view becomes consistent, allowing Kim to look down upon the concrete jungle. As Professor Park writes in Concrete Utopia, the apartment complexes often seen in the background present “a dignified, taut form that maintains perfect alignment.” These massive structures can’t be fully appreciated from the ground—they require a vantage point akin to Le Corbusier’s “liberation from gravity,” where architectural imagination soars citywide.

 

The leisure and festival scenes in Better Days are also familiar sights in mass media, usually accompanied by captions like: “Citizens cooling off in the pool at Hangang Park. / Photo by ○○○.” But Kim’s perspective, unshackled from gravity, captures more. He sees a different narrative—of Koreans adapting and coexisting, even amid constraints.

 

Parasols packed tightly around swimming pools, mass-produced shade tents stamped with ox-head logos, waves of apartment buildings surrounding the Han River like levees, and concrete pylons rising like obelisks in the middle of the river—do the ant-like crowds truly reflect joy and adaptation? Or is there something else at play? As I view Kim’s photos, I recall philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s words from The Disappearance of Rituals: “Rest has been subsumed by productivity, reduced to a vacation—a brief pause for recovery... But vacations are empty time, and that emptiness induces dread. Many people, in fact, fall ill during vacations.”

 

Kim’s works raise questions, not answers. Like aerial views of the human world, they are layered, complex, and open-ended. Viewers find themselves exploring his photographs like a Where’s Waldo? book by British illustrator Martin Handford—searching for a hidden protagonist. And in that search, they often find not just Waldo, but themselves. Hell, as Sartre said, may be other people—but it may also be oneself.

 

In Hadong Observation Station, however, finding Waldo is harder than ever. Perhaps he now wears an invisibility cloak, like Harry Potter. Light passes through, deceiving the eye. Unless it reflects back from a surface, it escapes perception altogether. Kim’s battle was against this very nature of light. Without light, we are all blind. But is light a particle? A wave?

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It was a particularly dark night. Dense sea fog, no moonlight—just pitch blackness. In his logbook, Kim wrote, “I stare blankly into the dark, seeing nothing.” But can we truly see the dark? Why do we say we see the dark, even when we see nothing? Is it because we intuit the presence of something beyond visibility?

 

That intuition finds proof in Kim’s developed film. The negative reverses what our retina perceives—where the sky, smoke, and clouds appear black, and the earth, white. Darkness, then, might simply be a trick of the mind.

 

Complete darkness is close to zero—unless one’s in a black hole. At 5:35 a.m. on February 6, 2023, just before dawn, the southern sky shimmered—not with sunlight, but with artificial light. Smoke from five vertical chimneys shot into the sky like straws stuck into the earth. The light from industrial complexes powered by Hadong’s electricity flowed toward the sea like molten lava. Still, most of the southern sky remained black. The AQI was 113—unhealthy for sensitive groups.

 

Kim printed this moment in two ways: once as seen by the human eye, and again as recorded by silver particles on film.

 

By Changkil Kim, The Kyunghyang Shinmun