“When I showed you my work before, you said you wanted to write something. I know the schedule’s a bit tight, but I wanted to talk to you about it.”
 
“Me?” Hmm. I couldn’t really remember.
 
“Yes.” His response was assertive.
 
He must have been showing me artwork for an exhibition, and that’s what I had told him.
 
It seemed a lot different from his earlier work, but it somehow felt similar in its context.
 
I was drawn to the recklessness of something that must have been impossible from the outset? something different the sort of photography that captures facts and places, something that attempted to capture time and the universe alongside history.

And yet…the pictures were pretty, but they were also sad, painful.

He titled the first of his star photographs Rifling. Referring to the helical groove in a gun barrel, rifling is said to cause the bullet to gain rotational inertia and a stable trajectory as it rotates along the spiral. Interestingly, Kim Taedong viewed the trajectory of movement in the photograph of stars as the spiral of a bullet? as rifling. This leap from stars to bullets seemed like something of a stretch, but as I heard him describe it, I sensed how the stars’ path might appear similar to rifling.

It also occurred to me that what led him to so naturally make the leap from a star’s pattern to bullets may have been the story behind where the photograph was taken. rifling-011, which could be called the first work in the Rifling series, had apparently been taken in a wartime historic site on the grounds of the Cheorwon Waterworks. The facts surrounding this area, which often appears in discussions of the DMZ around Cheorwon, are still in dispute. Built in 1936, the Cheorwon Waterworks were Gangwon Province’s first water facility. Some claim the location was also used to detain Japanese collaborators during the Korean War; others allege that over 300 people were shot or buried alive in storage tanks amid the flight from the area during the northern advance. It is difficult to confirm what the truth is, but it isn’t hard to imagine that the events that took place here were by no means aromantic or happy tale.

I imagined him coming here in the darkness after the sunset, with no one else around, and setting his camera on a tripod to capture the stars. At any moment, a wild animal could come springing out. A situation where nothing that happened would seem strange, nothing could be predicted. All sorts of thought would have come to mind as he stood out there in the middle of the night. He would have waited there, alone, and looked up at the sky to find it filled with stars. The atmosphere would have been damp and chilly. Seen amid that fear and terror, the stars would have appeared so beautiful? and in the moment of admiration for that beauty, there would have been no thoughts of anxiety or tension.

With its shining stars, the photograph was quite beautiful, gently capturing the gaze, yet I kept feeling my heart lurch in my chest? a fact that did not seem due to the “rifling” title alone. There were the glimpses of war memorials and other monuments in the image, the settings that those traces called to mind, the scars of war, the division of a nation. Had it not been Cheorwon, had it not been the vicinity of the DMZ, had it not been a place marked by the scars of wartime carnage and division, the stars would have told a different story. This explains the gunshots and shouts that can be heard in the photograph’s stars. The picture itself is quite tranquil and gentle, yet the viewer feels stunned and uncomfortable. If one were to suggest that this stunned discomfort was a mistake on my part, the result of overidentifying with the story conveyed by the setting, I would have nothing to say to them. So itis with Kim Taedong’s stars.

He described the process of photographing the stars as having been difficult. The hardest part, he said, was following the stars and fixing them in place. Kim’s star photographs are not pictures that capture stars alongside some object that appears in the image with them. Producing with something called an “equatorial telescope,” they use long exposure times to track and fix stars in order to capture them in the image. The aperture is kept open for the better part of an hour, and the process of moving precisely with the stars is quite a bit different from the typical “snapping” of photos. Not only that, but the artist also said it was difficult to predict how the image would come out during the tracking process. It might seem like a fool hardy approach indeed in an era where we can push the shutter and instantly see the results. When he is lugging over 100 kilograms of equipment to his setting, there is no actual guarantee he will be able to work at all. Many times, he must have waited and waited until daybreak, watching the weather and surrounding conditions change from one moment to the next, until eventually having to return without a single shot.

So the stars that appear in Kim’s star photographs are not the stars at the “moment” the shutter was pressed. They are images of starlight, which has traveled over hundreds of millions of light-years to arrive now on Earth. The resulting images of stars, presented to us clear and unwavering by opening the aperture and following their traces, are thus records of time? a time beyond the scope of human experience. It is the image of the wavering object underneath that starlight, at this moment. The wavering present under the stars is all the more realistic for being unclear. Like a composite, a painting, the wavering image conveys a subtle sense of tension, as the seemingly realistic objects suddenly lose their temporality, seeming instead like a stage set.

Kim Taedong’s star photographs have been come mainly as part of two series: Rifling, which may be seen as the beginning of his work with stars, and Planetes. They differ in the relatively stronger or weaker emphasison war or historical imagery, but they share a common grain in being records of “star time.” The most interesting thing about the works in these two series may be the unseen, dynamic movement that arises in the viewer beholding the photographs. This is one of the elements setting Kim’s star work apart from other photographs: even though it is a two-dimensional photographic image, it creates a temporal and spatial flow in which the gaze of the viewer looking upon it becomes either expanded infinitely beyond the image or compressed in front of it. Just as things seem to be blurring as we focus on the stars, some objective information enters our gaze? evidence of history, such as the Korean War and its associated monuments. Our attempts to focus sentimentally on the romantic motif of the “star” are frustrated by the marks of information captured within the gaze. Just as our gaze is ready to expand out into the vast reaches of the universe, a wavering image of the object drags it into the present. At first glance, the image seems quiet and peaceful, but the movement of the gaze within that image is more dynamic than in any other picture, a warlike back-and-forth between reason and feeling. He seems simply to have photographed stars, yet the images allow for an odd experience where we are struck by some kind of vague, weighty emotion that cannot be put precisely into words. These are the star photographs of Kim Taedong.

When I first heard from Kim about his Rifling series of starimages, it seemed a bit random to me? why stars all of a sudden? Looking at this earlier Day Break series, showing the unfamiliar people encountered late at night or early in the morning while the city is sleeping, or Break Days, depicting the sub-center of Seoul where he has long been living, I had imagined that he would continue on like other young photographers, showing stories of daily life and in the city within a similar context. Yet when I think back on it now, the potential for his star work may have been there from the time of Day Break. Night in the city wears a different face from the day. City night scan be brighter than the day, looser and sometimes sadder. It is a time when the barriers we just manage to sustain can loosen up. While he was working, the artist would make his way through the city night like a hunter or fleneur; to him, night was familiarity. Never mind the dazzling lights? the stars were there, in the night sky.

It may have been this familiarity with the night that allowed him to venture out to the waterworks with his camera in the middle of the night for the Real DMZ project. But the night that he encountered in Cheorwon? night in a place where the traces of history are still very much present ? may have had a different face to it. He may also have been entranced by the stars that were not visible in the city. In any case, I had the sense it may have been a natural process for him to open up his camera’s aperture to the stars.

Planetes is the title chosen for this exhibition, which includes works from the Rifling series (the star of Kim’s work with star) and the subsequent Planetes series. The name “Planetes” was taken from the title of a Japanese anime work telling the story of Hoshino Hachirota and his crew, who clean up debris around the Earth caused by rampant space development. Taken from the Greek, planetes is said to mean something like “wanderer” or “traveler.” Did Kim see something of the planetes in himself as he set out at night with his equipment to photograph stars? Did he see the planetes in his own inability to come out with any definite answers amid the reality of Korean history and society that he confronted as he photographed those stars? Perhaps he saw himself in the image of Hoshino wandering amid ideals and reality, cleaning up space debris as he goes.

Kim Taedong’s travels and wandering are still going on. While Planetes was begun as a work connected with the Korean War commissioned by the Australian War Memorial, it also seems to have served as turning point allowing his work with stars to move beyond its “war” and “history” framework and get at a more fundamental approach. Looking at the photographs in the Planetes series, one senses how the connection with the “star” and “war” motifs is somewhat looser. PLANETES Project, AU 005, a night image of Canberra taken when the artist happened to encounter a sea of clouds while working there, sticks with me as something akin to both an ending to this exhibition and a beginning for the next. Showing the lights of the city wavering against a blue-tinged night sky filled with stars and a sea of clouds stretching out underneath, the photograph seems to suggest what awaits him now: a time not for seeing through the stars, but seeing the stars as they are.
 
Having returned to the city, he will continue to work there.
 
But perhaps his perspective on the city has changed.
 
There are stars in the city too.
 
And when you look, there were stars every place he had been.