Youngjin Kim studied Fine Arts at the École des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, France.

She works with the photogram — a camera-less photographic technique in which light and objects interact directly on light-sensitive surfaces — to explore the boundary between presence and absence, memory and forgetting. Drawing on the epiphanic qualities of light, Kim renders invisible emotions and recollections into visible form, attending closely to the interplay of chance and inevitability that emerges through the process.

Through an artistic practice that bridges social events and personal experience, Kim builds an image-world where traces and disappearance coexist.

ARTIST STATEMENT

On the other side of the world, the light of Buenos Aires, Argentina arrives at a different angle and temperature than that of the northern hemisphere.Solar Record is an intimate trace of dialogue made without the mediation of a lens — sunlight passing directly
through plants and fragments of the city onto photosensitive paper.

Collected in places
where life and death, history and present converge — Plaza de Mayo, Recoleta Cemetery,
and the parks of Palermo — these images move beyond photographic representation
toward something more performative: treating light as a language through which
perception, existence, and the experience of the everyday are made visible.

The colors and forms embedded in the photographic paper are a palimpsest — layers of
the sun's altitude and the passage of time pressed into one another. As explored in the
previous work Palimpsest of Today (매일의 오늘), the present is always today shaped by
the accumulation of every yesterday.

Beneath the unfamiliar light of Buenos Aires,
ephemeral and transient things are transformed, in the moment they are placed under the
sun, into physical matter that holds its trace. Things that disappear, a language of
existence inscribed within absence — the lumen print is the place where disappearance
and what remains coexist.