The Secret Lives of Secret Places
What NYC rats have to do with Les Miserables, med school dropouts and photographic genius.
When Seoul-born artist Miru Kim moved to New York to attend college in 1999, she wasn’t officially an “artist” — she was a pre-med student interested in anatomy. But she grew increasingly fascinated by the city itself and began to look at it is a living organism, itching to dissect it and reveal its hidden layers. So she scrapped med school and decided to get an MFA instead.
In grad school, Kim became interested in the creatures that dwell on the fringes of society, in the hidden parts of the city. So she began photographing New York City rats. Eventually, she started going into the tunnels, discovering a whole new dimension to the city that most people don’t get to see. She connected with a subculture of like-minded urban explorers, adventurers and guerrilla historians, but somehow felt there was something missing from her photographs of these demolished underground spaces.
So she decided to create a fictional character that dwells in these places — the easiest way to do it was to model herself.
I decided against any clothing because I wanted the figure to be without any cultural implications or time-specific elements. I wanted a simple way to represent a living body inhabiting these decaying, derelict spaces.
This gave birth to a series titled Naked City Spleen, an allusion to Charles Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen — Naked City is the nickname for New York, and spleen captures “the melancholy inertia that comes from being alienated in an urban environment.”
The project took Kim around the world in search of hidden places — from the catacombs of Paris to London’s River Tyburn to the 19th century homeless asylums of Berlin. Her work, however, is about more than just the mere documentation of decay.
I like doing more than just exploring these spaces and feel an obligation to animate and humanize [them] continually in order to preserve their memories in a creative way before they’re lost forever.
Kim eventually went on to shoot two films on 60mm black-and-white film — Blind Door and Blind Window — as she became more interested in capturing movement and texture.
Watch her inspired TED talk, for a deeper look at the artist’s process, her unique brand of inspiration, and the cultural resonance of her work.
- 100 Places to Remember 100 photographs from 100 different places around the world in risk of disappearing due to climate change, based on UN reports, each taken by one of the world's greatest living photographers...
- Affordable Art: Six Places to Buy Six fantastic websites to buy affordable art from emerging photographers, illustrators and designers – and even contribute to charity along the way....
- ComplexCity: Hidden Patterns of Urbanity In ComplexCity, Korean artist Lee Jang Sub explores the concealed aesthetic formed by the infrastructure of the city and its evolution across time....
- Photographic Time Machine How to tear the space-time continuum with your bare hands and a camera lens – 3 photography projects that warp time through image....
- A Documentarian Collage of Humanity: 8 Billion Lives Inspired effort to foster global citizenship by showcasing the work of independent and amateur filmmakers, who capture day-in-the-life stories about ordinary and extraordinary people alike....
Great article, nicely done!
Brilliant idea, very cool. Her work is just all around inspiring