“Dispersion” exhibition: installation views of "Untitled (map)", and "Legend"

The Friends of Photography Ansel Adams Center, San Francisco, CA, 1998,

“In “Untitled (map)” 1998, a series of 24 photograms, borders that divide and define all the nations in the world are transformed into fractured outlines, creating a landscape of dispersed fragments. Taken out of the geographical context, with the sizes enlarged and reduced to similar scale, it is apparent that most nations become unrecognizable and the resemblance between the countries as a whole is emphasized. This process allows a reflection on the space of migration and borderlessness, and mirrors how we conceptualize our relationship to the world.

Legend, 1998,“ is a cluster of six light boxes on the floor at the center of a room with its placement evoking a site of archaeological digs. Each light box holds a plate of glass sandblasted with the imprint of bones of 'Lucy,' the three-million-year old fossil found in Africa in 1974 and proposed to be the common ancestor of later hominids. Although the shape of each bone is created by negative space, it appears three dimensional with illumination and suggests a metaphoric landscape in which humanity tries to remake nature in its own image.” -yk

Untitled (Map) 1998 detail of four silver gelatin photograms, 32 in. x 40 in each. Friends of Photography, Ansel Adams Center, San Francisco CA 1998

SOLO EXHIBITION, Young Kim/Dispersion, The Friends of Photography, San Francisco

“The installation by the Korean emigre artist, Young Kim, addresses subjects that have long interested her: race, identity, emigration, displacement, and memory. This time around the subjects are taken up in a wholly new way which departs from her poignant early work, dominated by autobiography and first-person text. Several white light-boxes lie on the floor at the centre of a large square room, compelling viewers to hover over them. The position is appropriate, speaking of grave viewing and archaeological digs - because their surface is etched with the image of the bones of 'Lucy,' the three-million-year old hominid found in Ethiopia in the 1970s. Lucy was widely hailed as a kind of Eve, and it is this ancestral mother from which the rest of Dispersion disperses. The other component of this simple installation is a series of photograms on glossy black paper running the length of the walls. Scattered across the paper are all the nations of the world, cut out like paper dolls, enlarged or reduced until all are similar in size. They are printed with greyish edges, making them look like the bits of ash that float away from burning paper. It's an elegiac installation: resting bones and floating ash, an alternative version of the Tower of Babel story, in which geography and nationality, not language, fragment humanity. The photograms resemble primary-school blackboards, as though this were a lesson in ethnic nationalism featuring ancient African bones as instructor. And it is a stunningly spare installation, leaving a whole empty room between white bones and black walls in which to reflect on such things as the space of geography and migration, the time of archaeology and ancestry, on the negative space that defines the jumbles of bones and nations; on the way Kim has made every nation an island, on the fragments that are all we know of such things as artistic intention and human history.”   

- Rebecca Solnit, contributing editor. Creative Camera, Oct/Nov 1998.

Untitled (Map), #23, silver gelatin photogram, 32 in x 40 in, 1998