Article publié dans Les Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace, Myriam Aït-Sidhoum.
Translated into English by ChatGPT:
The artist-run gallery In Extremis presents an exhibition featuring Strasbourg-based artist Nathalie Savey and Korean artist Young June Kim. Two photographers offer distinct perspectives on our intimate relationship with nature and with finitude, supported by demanding technical approaches. Autopsy of a Breath can be discovered over just two weekends.
Korean artist Young June Kim returns from an exhibition in his home country, at the Hanmi Samcheong Museum in Seoul, a museum dedicated to photography. He presents here a series with an evocative title, Return to Paradise. His father passed away in 2019 as a result of Parkinson’s disease. Photographs taken at his bedside, simply with a mobile phone and with his consent, were later used—after his passing—to create bas-relief sculptures of his face and body.
Young June Kim originally trained in the arts, including sculpture, before fully devoting himself to photography, which he further developed in France. On these casts, including hearts, the artist superimposes bamboo roots or other fleeting natural elements, such as ephemeral ripples on the surface of rivers. These volumes were then photographed using a large-format camera. His monochrome prints confront death head-on, yet they are not macabre. Pale blue and earthy tones offer what feels like a poetic burial for the absent figure.
A final statement is embodied entirely in a face resembling a death mask, upon which butterflies—symbols of the departed soul—have been placed.
Forty years of photography in nature
A similar attention to Asian philosophy runs through the work of Nathalie Savey. The Strasbourg-based artist has previously spent time in South Korea for an artistic residency. In her outdoor black-and-white photographs, nature—and stones in particular—are omnipresent. She does not “copy” reality but interprets it, without moving anything. Everything must be in place: the season, the right light, and above all the desire for an image, so that what appears is not merely a landscape, but what she intends to reveal through it.
The search for the precious moment can take months, as was the case at the Fischboedlé, a small lake in the Wormsa valley, for one image from this series in which she literally becomes a water spirit.
The images are never retouched; everything happens before and at the moment of exposure—a principle shared by Young June Kim. The two artists met through Strasbourg-based collector Madeleine Millot-Durrenberger, who regularly exhibits her substantial collection at the artist-run gallery In Extremis.
— Myriam Aït-Sidhoum
Autopsy of a Breath. Saturday 22 and Sunday 23 November, Saturday 29 and Sunday 30 November, from 2 pm to 6 pm. Free entry, guided visit at 6 pm.
In Extremis, 27 rue Sainte-Madeleine, Strasbourg.