Miru Kim, “IA 1,” digital C-print, 2010 (© 2010 by Miru Kim)
Doosan Gallery
533 West 25th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through April 23, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
Artist Talk: Thursday, March 31, free, 6:00
212-242-6343
www.doosangallery.com
www.mirukim.com
For Miru Kim’s latest project, the performance artist and photographer took photos of herself naked on pig farms in Iowa and Missouri, posing with the animals. The work was inspired by Jacques Derrida’s “The Animal That Therefore I Am” — which starts, “In the beginning, I would like to entrust myself to words that, were it possible, would be naked” — and by iconoclastic French philosopher Michel Serres’s musings on the human skin, which she quotes from in her artist statement. Kim places her skin against the skin of the pigs, creating beautiful images that go beyond mere feminist metaphors and animal activism. “As I lay down next to a sow weighing five hundred pounds,” Kim writes on the walls of the gallery, “I felt the warmth travel from the soft underbelly of the animal into my bare right thigh. Two bodies mingled momentarily, in the skin on skin contact. I could no longer reason whether I was feeling the pig’s abdomen on my thigh, or the pig was feeling my thigh on her abdomen. The line between the subject and the object were obscured, and two souls mingled on the plane of contact.”
Miru Kim, “Compositions 1 and 5,” digital C-print, 2010 (© 2010 by Miru Kim)
Her five “Composition” pieces are hung together on one wall, unframed, extreme close-ups of her body pressed firmly against that of a pig, inviting visitors to get up close and personal, as if they were in the pen as well. In fact, at the March 24 opening, the gallery was so packed that it mimicked some of the photos, although in this case Kim was dressed. In “MO 1,” her right arm is reaching up, echoing the pigs’ water feeders, while in “MO 2,” Kim is standing, facing away from the camera, exposing her backside much like the pigs’ bottoms and tails that stick out of the gates. And in others, she lies down, bends over, and kneels in the mud, becoming one with the animals.
Raised in Seoul and based in New York City, Kim traveled the world for her previous series, “Naked City Spleen,” taking pictures of herself nude in abandoned buildings, on rooftops and bridges, and in underground tunnels, becoming part of the urban architecture in Istanbul, Detroit, Paris, Philadelphia, Seoul, and New York. The new series, “The Pig That Therefore I Am,” debuted at last fall’s Fokus Lódz Biennale 2010 and is now on view at the Doosan Gallery in Chelsea through April 23. Kim, who has given lectures at the 2010 Conflux Festival, the second World Culture Forum, and the Entertainment Gathering 2008, will give a free Artist Talk at Doosan on Thursday, March 31, at 6:00.