Artist-Miru Kim

Naked City Spleen, Les Catacombes de Paris, photographic prints

Naked City Spleen, River Tyburn, London, photographic prints


Miru Kim is an artist, photographer and illustrator. She ventures into places to make her art that most of us would neither enter nor risk arrest to be in: underground tunnels, sewers, abandoned factories, power plants, the tops of bridges and churches. Once she arrives at these hidden and desolate places, Kim explores the setting, finds the best point of view, puts her camera on a tripod, and removes her clothes — in order to take some of the most engaging photographs of the moment. Her pose isn’t flashy or provocative; instead, Kim becomes one with the space she inhabits. She researches each site and learns its history and considers how the body, which metaphorically could be that of a child or an animal, might approach it. These abandoned and hard to find places become her playgrounds, where art can be made.


Kim was born in Stoneham, Massachusetts in 1981 but was raised in Seoul, Korea. She moved back to Massachusetts in 1995 to attend Phillips Academy in Andover and moved to New York City in 1999 to attend Columbia University. In 2006, she received an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute. One of her recent exhibition took place at the gallery HYUNDAI Gangnam Space at the end of August 2009.