Adopting a dispassionate, almost taxonomic approach to parsing the elusive, multifaceted experience of inhabiting a certain social and physical environment (an urban Asian metropolis continuously undergoing transformation) at a given moment (the early 21st century), Sanggil Kim deploys technical sophistication and formal rigor in photographic images that alternately defamiliarize the familiar and dramatize – even melodramatize, sometimes to discomfiting effect – the banal. From the precisely staged psychosocial tableaus of his earlier motion picture series, and the continuing series of architectonic studies of urban structures and spaces in Seoul and other Asian cities, to the more recent series of group portraitures that capture individuals existing in virtual, Internet-based communities defined by a single specific, sometimes eccentric, interest – the wearing of Burberry plaids, for example – his work constitutes a contemporary archeology of illusory systems, networks, and structures.
