Where Disharmony Flourishes, Temporary Garden
Kim Sunik’s photographs show scenes that reveal a world different from the order commonly called a "garden." A garden in the traditional sense is a place where human hands manage and partition nature. However, his photographs capture nature's intrusions and breakthroughs: unexpected combinations and entanglements. Trees bursting through roofs, stems pushing aside construction barriers, plastic planters occupying house fronts, wire and branches grown together over time. These images reveal a world where "nature" and "non-nature" penetrate each other and coexist in an uncoordinated state.
Nature's vital force forms one vast continuum, yet it is far from a harmonious chorus. Each being taps into this shared force and moves in its own unique direction, making the world full of discord and collisions. This discord reveals the true nature of these competing forces. Kim Sunik's photographs find vitality in precisely this disharmony. When ginkgo leaves briefly adorn a car's surface, the materiality of metal and organism creates new patterns, pulsing with life. Iron fences can never fully contain what they're meant to separate, as growing trees inevitably seek out and widen these gaps.
These scenes bring to mind Jane Bennett's idea that not only living beings but all matter reveals its own vitality. Everything from flowers and trees to buildings and cars, wire, wooden chopsticks, and plastic planters exerts force in its own way and relates to its surroundings. Although no figures appear directly, there are traces of human presence: a clumsily trimmed heart-shaped flower bed, a gardener's silhouette barely visible among dense foliage, blending seamlessly into the garden landscape. Thus, Kim Sunik's photographs are read not as landscape photographs with "nature" as background, but as scenes where diverse elements interact and generate vitality.
"Temporary Garden" is a record of the vitality created as life and non-life, nature and artifice penetrate each other in a non-harmonious continuum. This garden no longer depends on human design and coordination. Rather, gaps and collisions, imbalances form a living order. Kim Sunik's photographs unfold before us precisely that ephemeral harmony—a world where disharmony flourishes.
(Text: Yoon Yeowool)
Exhibition view: Temporary Garden, Variable dimention, Arcadeseoul Mullae, Seoul, South Korea <2023>
Temporary Garden [Box]
64 posters in the box
The Temporary Garden (2023) catalogue is more than documentation—it lives alongside the exhibition, at times becoming the exhibition itself. Both catalogue and exhibition treat the gallery not as fixed space but as fleeting event, opening briefly before disappearing. By choosing posters over framed works, the exhibition embraces the lightest possible medium, echoing the discordant cohabitation and the spontaneous order that emerges from gaps—exactly what Kim Sunik captures in his photographs. Rather than simply preserving the exhibition, this catalogue becomes a portable exhibition space, ready to unfold anywhere and create new "temporary gardens" with each encounter.
- 300 Copies
- Offset print
- Design: Jang Minhye
- Text: Yoon Yeowool
- Printed in February 2023
- Produced by TTTC, TTTbook