A Lounge to view Art
In Downtown Jersey City Power Art District
Miru Kim
www.mirukim.com
“Naked City Spleen” is a multi-media project in progress currently focused on a photography series.
The title takes inspiration from the nickname of New York City (Naked City) and poetry of Baudelaire (Paris Spleen).
The images portray various urban ruins, such as abandoned subway stations, tunnels, aqueducts, catacombs, factories, hospitals, and shipyards, and incorporate a human body form inhabiting these spaces. There is a performance aspect to the project that blurs the conventional notions of photographer and model, since the artist does both, setting up the camera on tripod and self-timer after searching and infiltrating these man-made structures forgotten or ignored by most.
Miru Kim is a photographer, art consultant, graphic designer, and illustrator.
Her photography has appeared in various media such as New York Times, Time Out New York, The Korea Daily, La Stampa, The Dong-A Ilbo, HDNet TV, New York Times Upfront, Yen Magazine, AnimalNewYork.com, Gothamist.com, and in many shows in NYC and Berlin.
Her most recent illustrations include a national book project, Women: A Celebration of Strength with Edwidge Danticat and Anna Quindlen.
Miru also founded Naked City Arts, LLC, an organization dedicated to promoting young talents in fine art, film, and music, and to bringing arts to Lower Manhattan.
With her technical proficiency, she has designed not only her own company logos and website but also branding and marketing materials for some major political campaigns, US Open - Squash, and artist John Crawford, while working as an artistic director at East River Media, Inc.
Every photography student throughout recorded history has taken at least one picture of a pretty, naked woman in some gritty, desolate environment.
But as much as that trope has been abused for the sake of senior theses, there's something fresh in this series by Miru Kim. In the images, a woman bends over in a sewer, reaches up in a factory, sits perched on a metal railing and lies down on a menacing-looking industrial worktable.
How many tetanus shots must she have had to be so perfectly composed, her delicate, bare
body threatened on all sides by an abundance of rust?
-Ada Calhoun
"Ms. Kim’s site, mirukim.com, which has made her something of a legend in urban explorer circles, contains a section devoted to a project she calls 'Naked City Spleen.'
The site features color photographs of Ms. Kim, naked, posed in abandoned tunnels and structures in New York and elsewhere.
In one, she crouches like a cat on a vast slab of rusting steel amid the ruins of the former Revere sugar refinery, now demolished, in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
In another, she appears, back turned to the camera, squeezed into the narrow heating tunnels below Columbia University, her alma mater.
The effect is powerful, not just because of the eroticism, but also because her nakedness seems to emphasize her human vulnerability."
-Ben Gibberd, The New York Times.
www.mirukim.com
“Naked City Spleen” is a multi-media project in progress currently focused on a photography series.
The title takes inspiration from the nickname of New York City (Naked City) and poetry of Baudelaire (Paris Spleen).
The images portray various urban ruins, such as abandoned subway stations, tunnels, aqueducts, catacombs, factories, hospitals, and shipyards, and incorporate a human body form inhabiting these spaces. There is a performance aspect to the project that blurs the conventional notions of photographer and model, since the artist does both, setting up the camera on tripod and self-timer after searching and infiltrating these man-made structures forgotten or ignored by most.
Miru Kim is a photographer, art consultant, graphic designer, and illustrator.
Her photography has appeared in various media such as New York Times, Time Out New York, The Korea Daily, La Stampa, The Dong-A Ilbo, HDNet TV, New York Times Upfront, Yen Magazine, AnimalNewYork.com, Gothamist.com, and in many shows in NYC and Berlin.
Her most recent illustrations include a national book project, Women: A Celebration of Strength with Edwidge Danticat and Anna Quindlen.
Miru also founded Naked City Arts, LLC, an organization dedicated to promoting young talents in fine art, film, and music, and to bringing arts to Lower Manhattan.
With her technical proficiency, she has designed not only her own company logos and website but also branding and marketing materials for some major political campaigns, US Open - Squash, and artist John Crawford, while working as an artistic director at East River Media, Inc.
Every photography student throughout recorded history has taken at least one picture of a pretty, naked woman in some gritty, desolate environment.
But as much as that trope has been abused for the sake of senior theses, there's something fresh in this series by Miru Kim. In the images, a woman bends over in a sewer, reaches up in a factory, sits perched on a metal railing and lies down on a menacing-looking industrial worktable.
How many tetanus shots must she have had to be so perfectly composed, her delicate, bare
body threatened on all sides by an abundance of rust?
-Ada Calhoun
"Ms. Kim’s site, mirukim.com, which has made her something of a legend in urban explorer circles, contains a section devoted to a project she calls 'Naked City Spleen.'
The site features color photographs of Ms. Kim, naked, posed in abandoned tunnels and structures in New York and elsewhere.
In one, she crouches like a cat on a vast slab of rusting steel amid the ruins of the former Revere sugar refinery, now demolished, in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
In another, she appears, back turned to the camera, squeezed into the narrow heating tunnels below Columbia University, her alma mater.
The effect is powerful, not just because of the eroticism, but also because her nakedness seems to emphasize her human vulnerability."
-Ben Gibberd, The New York Times.
