shashasha

As the title of her debut photobook Magic suggests, New York-based artist Kang-Hee Kim uses street photography to depict a world that does not exist. With Photoshop as a modern collage tool, she combines fragments of two or more photographs to create surreal landscapes where clouds change patterns when cut by power lines or workers using potted plants to construct buildings. Looking through her images there is of course the enjoyable effect of surprise at discovering the impossibilities in the scenes she creates, but Kim made sure to elevate her photography from simple visual toy with layers of wanderlust and escapism and her keen eye for the magical in seemingly bland situations.