Kim Young-Soo, a Korean artist, creates The Monad series by taking photos of the world not through the lens of a camera but through the lens of ‘googling’. Kim believes that today the world is viewed through the window of “googling” as most people obtain their knowledge and information through a google search. What people find on google is the reflexed appearance of society and in this search a line between reality and the virtual world becomes blurred. By removing the evidence of the being (shape), The Monad invites the viewers to imagine the root of existence casting a question “Where are we from and where are we going?” Kim provides the viewers a space to ponder upon the existential value of humanity which gets weaker by the digital civilization. Kim said, “I understand this world through googling and perceive the desires of man that is unconsciously inherent.”
To create his work Monad, Kim collects thousands of scattered images from the internet space through “googling”. Then, he condenses the images to create tiny particles in which forms disappear, leaving only the original color of the image. Kim creates his works by tangling and overlapping these particles. Instead of following the common procedures of photography, which expresses concepts through reproducing reality, Kim reverses the procedure by only leaving the color. The mediated concepts are only perceived, or even unnoticed. The “remnant colors” symbolize the Monad from which the material elements have been removed. “Monad” is a concept that was first introduced by a German philosopher Leibnitz in the 17th century as the basic unit for all beings. The Monad attempts to imagine the internal things such as the true nature of the world through the images symbolized externally.
Kim Young-Soo's MONAD series have been exhibited in numerous exhibitions including "MONAD paradox of images" at Gallery Seoi in Seoul, Korea; "China Lishui International Photo Festival" in Lishui, China; "MONAD Exhibition" in New York, the USA, and many more. Kim Young-Soo earned an MBA from KAIST and MFA in Photography at Han Kyung University in Korea.
