I think of photography as being about touch, perhaps only about touch—it speaks to our need to be held in a moment, in ourselves. We all need to feel wanted and caressed; it’s something you can’t possibly simulate or satiate alone. Kim’s photographs are imbued with a desire for another, but not only in an amorous, sexual way, though sometimes it is a libidinal energy that charges them. But it’s the absence of that elsewhere which gives those images that have it a special kind of aura.
Their beauty isn’t always in the way a body meets another; no, it’s in how the edge of a denim waistband interacts with the torso of an ambiguously gendered young figure in that most Roland Barthes way, where it’s the relationship of surfaces itself that brings about the eroticism, the notsaid as much as the said. It’s in the way he treats an object with the same reverence and attention as he would a body or head—how both those things operate in a comparable register in Kim’s view. It’s in the roving curiosity of his gaze.
But it would be remiss to ignore the fabric of these three rooms, which we might describe as ‘untouched’. That’s the language we use for interiors that haven’t been modernised. No one has been in here for 20 years, or so I’m told—the overhead electricity doesn’t work, and the stairs are a deathtrap. The show is like an offering to a domestic space that wants to be re-enlivened by this attention. But its magic is in the relationships: the way the jeans wrap the torso is not dissimilar from how the fluttering Japanese paper on which these photographs are printed meets the flaking walls that support them.
The will to reconcile this subject matter—whether Mexico City queer kids or dignified elders—feels like a needless pursuit. With the relationship being the central thread here, there’s an easy answer: it’s Kim that connects this work. It’s fundamentally about his inherent generosity and fascination with spirit. He brings these subjects together. One man might be unclothed; another might be turning away from us or purporting to bare himself to us, captured with compassion always. Whatever the case, they saw the camera first and us second.
To touch them with our eyes in this space, in what Kim described as a ‘moment of intimacy’: something one-to-one and felt, but potentially only for a flash. This delicate show feels, to me, to be less rooted in a specific, isolated instance of visibility or representation, or even a certain geography or politics—though all of that is here, of course—than in how all those layers interact and how generative and universal apprehending and sharing a moment can be—how eclectic life is when you pay close attention to its details.
—Sean Burns
