making photomontage and small structures inspired by newspaper stories

Ayoung Kim
Minima Memoria
5th June - 1st August 2010
Streetlevel Photoworks - Glasgow

In Minima Memoria the artist has created a series of photographic works based around headlines in newspapers describing serious crimes, suicides, unusual incidents and disasters. From these headlines, she re-imagines and recreates the scenes as 3D models and then produces these photomontage works to bring a fresh and new perspective to the story.

The artist has described the photographs as representing various fleeting and ephemeral events that happen in the world, being transformed into representations in news media. She said ‘I take pictures from my environment, alter the images and move them into stage-sets according to each context of event which I collect from the UK and from South Korea, where I come from.’




‘(Kim) deconstructs and reconstructs a world of images to explore her own place within it… Her dizzying angular perspectives provide sets for staging herself, a character dislocated and displaced, finding echoes of her own experience in disasters that happened just around the corner, or to girls whose experience as students abroad mirrors her own (until the moment they disappeared). Meaning emerges from Kim’s fearless examination of the meaninglessness of these small catastrophes. She cannot unlock the mystery of Alexander Litvinenko’s death or an anonymous city suicide; the construction of each dense delirious image is an opportunity for the artist to project herself imaginatively into a scenario, to probe its poetic and metaphorical possibilities… Ayoung Kim restages the crime with the cool logic of the detective and the gruesome fascination of the voyeur. Her cutting and pasting takes place in three dimensional space, yielding impossible spaces for the eye to penetrate. In the process of montage some of the original meaning of the images is lost, and other meanings accrue.’



Born in Seoul, Korea in 1979, Ayoung Kim is a an artist who lives and works in London.
She was given a B.A. (Honours) in Photography from London College of Communication and an M.A. in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design. She had a solo show Ephemera at I-Myu Projects, London in 2009, and group shows including Korean Eye: Moon Generation, Saatchi Gallery, London, 2009, Lateral Thinkers - from the Mind to the Wall in Darmstadt days of photography, Mathildenhohe, Darmstadt, Germany in 2008, and T.error: Your Fear Is an External Object, Mucsarnok (Kunsthalle) Budapest, Hungary in 2008.