By Helin Jung Photographs by Miru Kim
Miru Kim is walking through the Upper West Side via Amtrak tunnel, navigating a mostly-dark, cavernous space, watching for the occasional train to rumble past. She avoids a small puddle and says, “I don’t like the water.”
“I have a lot of phobias, actually.”
Kim is an artist—she takes photographs, paints and draws. She is also an artist who, for the past three years, has taken photographs of herself, nude, in decrepit, dirty and dark places all over the world. The train tracks are nothing; she was once naked in a sewer so toxic she needed a gas mask.
But the fear of water, it’s a curious idiosyncrasy. As a first grader, she realized that she would have to take a swim test in the fourth grade, and couldn’t stop crying for days. She used to be afraid of the dark, too, but she got over that one eventually.
The work that has dominated Kim’s professional and personal life over the past three years is a seriestitled “Naked City Spleen,” which features portraits of Kim, who has a petite and nymphlike figure, sprawled over bones in Parisian catacombs, reclining over a table at a morgue, and, of course, standing and running atop train tracks. It is work that mixes photography with urban exploration, a penetration of the city in ways that most of humanity is too afraid, disinterested or law-abiding to undertake, and Kim posits that having been afraid for most of her life may have spurred her to be braver as a grown-up.
Kim was raised near the wooded foothills of Yonsei University, where she explored the forest and scrambled around on the slopes, enjoying the freedom of a pastoral corner of metropolitan Seoul. When she was 12, Kim begged her parents to send her to the United States so that she could go to boarding school, and she eventually ended up at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. Her parents, both academics, teach philosophy and Chinese linguistics and remain in Korea.
Her first stop on the way to Andover was an aunt’s house in Mission Viejo, Calif. She calls it the worst year of her life. Isolated, ridiculed, and unable to speak English, Kim spent the entire year studying (“Studying, studying, studying, studying”). After Andover, she attended college at Columbia University, where she was on a mostly pre-med track until she decided that art was her passion.
At her parents’ suggestion, she began an MFA program at the Pratt Institute, but the academic environment wasn’t quite stimulating enough, which is part of what led her to start “Naked City Spleen.”
“One of the reasons I got into exploring was because I was bored in school,” Kim says. “I didn’t like what I was doing, I didn’t like the classes I was taking, I didn’t really have any professors that I admired at Pratt, so I started looking for something else outside of the academic painting world.”
Recognition of her work was gradual, but Kim was still a student when Time Out New York featured her work in the magazine in 2006. Over the next few years came coverage in the New York Times, the Financial Times, Esquire, and even a part in a documentary film by Albert Maysles. But she began to tire of the press and the requests for help on term papers from students who were profiling her.
“That becomes repetitive,” she says. “They ask me the same questions, and I tell them the same things.”
Soon, the work became more “worklike” as well, and she realized that she was working on the same concepts over and over.
“It never gets repetitive, the act of doing this, because you’re always going to new places, you’re always looking to find new things, which I love to do, that’s why I keep doing it,” she says.
Kim is currently prepping prints for a show in Korea in September, after which she hopes to devote her time to a new project. The setting for it is still mostly urban, though she is turning from structures to animals—rats, pigeons and pigs.
“I’m trying to identify with other dwellers, urban dwellers—they don’t have to be necessarily human,” Kim said. “So the pigeons, the way they see the city must be very different from the way humans see it.”
Kim has always had an affinity for animals (she’s the guardian of a pet tuxedo rat named Matta), and has a sympathy for these “urban dwellers” that most urban-dwelling humans don’t possess.
She is particularly fond of finding the nesting areas of pigeons when she explores tunnels, intrigued by the skill with which these birds stay hidden from people.
“There’s one particular area under a tunnel towards the entrance, there’s really massive, massive amounts of pigeon dung,” Kim said. “I mean it’s really massive. Caked on. The entire wall is covered in pigeon dung and also on the ground. It looks almost sculptural. If you walk on it, it’s pillowy.”
After a pause, “I know you can get sick from it, but I’m fine.”
Kim’s art, whether it involves abandoned farm colonies or pigeons nestling in building crevices, always comes down to perspective, in seeing things and places in unusual, different ways. And down in the tunnels under the parks and highways along the Upper West Side, where the only sounds come from up above, there is a calm. The city roars as its underbelly sleeps.
