Sangbin Im

Selected Works     Biography     Press Release

Project Room: Photographs

November 30, 2006 – January 30, 2007 Opening Reception: Thursday, November 30, 2006, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.

Cristinerose Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of new photographs by Sangbin Im. Sangbin Im, a Korean artist who currently lives in New York, creates digitally manipulated photographs by interconnecting numerous pictures he has taken over a period of several hours. His works show the relationship between the real and the virtual, the part and the whole; appearance and manipulation.

His seamless exaggerated architectural scapes are extravagant spectacles that find their inspiration in the critical interpretation of advertising, where everything is bigger than life. As a photographer, he is interested in the ways in which many contradictory modes of viewing and re-viewing the world interact. His architectural scapes not only demonstrate what we believe to be true can constantly be challenged by what we see, but also investigate how the status of truth is opened to question by examination of the complex relationship between appearance and perception.

His City Scape series is staged in Seoul and New York, each magnificent in scale, replete with history. All of which Sangbin Im is familiar with as a resident of both megalopolises. In this series, he focuses on symbolic and grandiose buildings such as old royal palaces and transforms their historical images into fantastical and modernized versions of the original. The buildings, streets, monuments and palaces photographs: they seem familiar at a distance; a closer look reveals ambiguity, and the familiar looms strange and alien.

Sangbin Im majored in painting at Seoul National University in Korea. He then moved to the United States, where he received an MFA in painting and printmaking at Yale University. Currently, he lives in New York City while working on a doctoral degree in art and art education at Columbia University.