Shinwook Kim

Shinwook Kim (KR)

In Search Of Nessie

Producing photographic work is one way of telling a story. What stories do we find interesting? There are stories that are still haunting people even after a long time. Some stories travel back and forth between time and space yet remain active. These stories, with enough vitality to reach beyond generation and region, are preserved by the means of naming them myths or superstitions.

The project In Search of Nessie began with the question of where and how such stories began and how they might affect real life and culture. Loch Ness, a huge lake dating back to the Ice Age in Scotland’s Northern Highlands region, is also a mythical place that is widely known around the world, for the reason that it might be hosting a dinosaur-like creature – the Loch Ness monster, informally named “Nessie”. In 1934 a photograph of a mysterious creature began to circulate – this was, however, a prank by a surgeon named Robert Wilson. The photograph triggered this longstanding mythological phenomenon of Mother Nature to become the target of consumption and distribution. There are even records in the Guinness-Records Book of a self-proclaimed “Nessie Hunter”, who has been searching for Nessie for thirty years. Another man, Adrian Shine, has researched the Loch Ness and its mysterious creature for over about 45 years. Throughout 2018-2019, there has been another scientific investigation into Loch Ness monster DNA by geneticists from New Zealand and other countries.

The photographer Shinwook Kim does not intend to look for Nessie’s real existence, instead, he desires to uncover how invisible myths permeate an actual place and create a variety of devices, designed to imagine the myth through the surrounding landscape, characters and various archives. Through this work, he intends to find the elements of a myth that are created, spread, propagated, and maintained in a particular place. Shinwook hopes to reveal fragmented images and disrupt the way they operate in order to find out how they give meaning to a particular place and through what kind of a process this is achieved. What makes a story (a myth) and how is it maintained and operated?

Various artworks of the artist were exhibited at the National Museum of Finland, Pyhän Birgitan puisto, and JCDecaux Finland.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Shinwook Kim is an artist and photographer based in London, Milan and Seoul. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London and master’s degree in Fine Art Photography from Royal College of Art, London. The artist has been working on structuring a huge world through close observation and collection of his surroundings while seeking to find the nature of it. Shinwook has been exhibited internationally in for example the UK, France, Italy, Netherlands, Finland/Sweden, Japan as well as in his motherland South Korea. His works are held in permanent collection at the Kiyosato Photo Art Museum in Japan, KT&G SangSang Madang, SPACE22 in South Korea and Oriel College, University of Oxford in the UK and many more. He is also represented by CE contemporary in Milan, Italy.