Kim In Sook, “Saturday Night,” C-print, Diasec, 2007
Gana Art New York
568 West 25th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through May 8
Admission: free
212-229-5858
www.ganaart.com
We were terrifically excited when we heard that Korean photographer Kim In Sook was having her first solo show in New York this spring, at Gana Art in Chelsea. Kim’s large-scale “Saturday Night” was a hit at several art fairs over the last few years, a giant shot of a colorful hotel in which various activities are taking place in each room, usually involving some form of sex and violence. It’s like Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” taken to the extreme, mixed in with a little Gregory Crewdson, Thomas Struth, and Thomas Ruff as the viewer becomes the voyeur. Last fall, we were invited to a private showing of more of her outstanding, provocative work at Gana, celebrating the publication of some of her architectural photos in the New York Times Magazine, where we got the opportunity to meet the charming Kim, speaking with her outside as she nervously smoked cigarettes to get away from the adoring crowd. So it was with great disappointment that we finally made our way to Chelsea to see her series on the all-glass German museum the Langen Foundation and her “Kokain” and “Heroin” duo only to be told that those pictures, which were in the upstairs gallery, had already been taken down in preparation for Gana’s next exhibition, even though this one was not scheduled to end until May 8. Still, seeing “Saturday Night” again is a delight, as are her other frontal shots of buildings in New York and Germany filled with people in the midst of carefully choreographed activities and “Die Auktion,” a stunning shot of a nude woman standing on a pedestal on a red carpet, surrounded by men in suits bidding on her. If you’ve never seen her work, it’s absolutely worth a visit, but we can’t help feeling that it’s now only half an exhibit.