Medium: Gelatin silver print
Edition: 3/12
Framing: Museum-quality framing with anti-reflective glass
Signature: Signed by the artist
Winter Light and General Guan both belong to DaeSoo Kim's long-running bamboo series. Since 1998, Kim has consistently used bamboo forests as a central subject, photographing them across Korea, China, and Japan, and transforming bamboo-through gelatin silver printing and darkroom control-into a visual carrier of Eastern spirituality. Exhibition texts note that his concern lies not merely in the description of bamboo groves, but in the literati ethos, ethical resonance, and the deep, sacred relationship between man and nature embedded in bamboo within East Asian culture.
In these two works, bamboo is both visible landscape and inner image. Winter Light emphasizes the subtle transformation between light and darkness, emptiness and presence, allowing the bamboo forms to generate a quiet and inward tension between clarity and depth. General Guan, by contrast, adopts a more upright and monumental structure, pushing the strength and integrity of bamboo toward an almost personified symbolic presence. One meditative and one resolute, the two works together reveal the essence of Kim's bamboo series: they are not simply landscapes, but sustained reflections on character, time, order, and the spiritual dimension of nature through one of the central motifs of East Asian culture.
Kim DaeSoo was born in Seoul in 1955. He studied at Hongik University, Parsons School of Design in New York, and Pratt Institute, and has taught in the visual communication field at Hongik University since 1993. His practice has long focused on motifs such as bamboo, trees, and sky, using photography to evoke Eastern spirituality and the inner relationship between human beings and nature. His solo exhibitions include DaeSoo Kim Photography at Francoise Livinec, Paris, in 2015, Sky Wind Stars and Me at Gallery BK, Seoul, in 2017, and ManBoo at ARTPARK, Seoul, in 2025.