JUNGMIN KIM

Departing.

You are going to an airport to see off or greet your traveling family and friends. For me, my relationship with airports is(has been? has become?) special, like those with my old friends.   

I have been living abroad in New York City for 8 years to study photography. This relationship first started when I was boarding myself on a jumbo-jet moving to New York from Seoul. The nonstop long-haul flight would take about, and stop over flights would take much longer, but either way they were hilarious journeys for me. I still remember those big electronic birds in that gigantic space, which became my annual event during the last 8 years. On the plane, I realize that this is one of the essential parts of my life, to keep crossing a gate to the another, like a wormhole, meeting new culture and environment after that long wait sitting on a chair looking outside for the new view, sound, and smell. It is extremely jarring to transport to a new place without much hard work; just like movies.

When the gates open, I synchronize the images I have seen from the mass media to reality, inhaling and looking to the new world. In this project, the airports that I passed by, from Inchon international airport, JFK international airport to Haneda Airport and so on, are my photographic subjects, to show the airports on their looks and how they are constructed by people who live in the city. Each airport has its own identity like a human being, and studying them and their characters can in turn lets me and hopefully viewers contemplate on who I am and they are as a human. 

I intend to illustrate this personality with my camera with that purpose.