Kanghee Kim: Street Errands

Presented by Brookfield Properties in partnership with Photoville Festival

KangHee Kim’s work takes the viewer to another world with her series of collaged photographs entitled, Street Errands. The artist starts off with New York City street scenes capturing mundane occurrences, encountered while performing everyday errands in the city. Kim then mixes in imagery from other places she has traveled throughout the country, manipulating the photographs, and constructing her own form of surreal escapism.

The fabrication of these fictional scenes introduces infinite possibility, free from the limits or restraints of real life. Born in Seoul, South Korea, KangHee Kim immigrated to the United States with her family as a teenager. However, due to unforeseen circumstances and visa restrictions, the artist cannot travel abroad and has not been able to go back to South Korea for over ten years. Kim has developed a photographic practice that builds layers of photos and/or modifies original photographs, to create new spaces. Creating surrealistic or fictional images with her photographs allows Kim to feel liberated and free, despite her circumstances.

In this series, the artist started to think of the collages as paintings, choosing to show evidence of the post-production process by leaving small traces of imperfection intentionally untouched. Small imperfections are human; they are what makes people attractive. Leaving the flaws and marks visible in her photographs, Kim chooses to instead achieve perfection—in her eyes—by perfectly merging two or more images and finding the spark between them.

KANGHEE KIM is an artist/photographer based in New York. She has BFA in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltomore, MD. She is represented by Benrubi Gallery, New York, NY. She has had multiple solo and group exhibitions internationally, most recently, Dreamer at Benrubi Gallery and at D Museum, Seoul, South Korea. Learn more at kanghee.kim and on Instagram at @tinycactus.

Photoville is a New York-based nonprofit organization that promotes photography and works to make this art form widely accessible.