For her series "No Sleep", Hee Jin Kang photographs mattresses abandoned on the streets of New York City, mostly in Brooklyn. Kang’s work reveals the unexpected beauty and strangeness of these found urban still lifes. The discarded beds are pathetic, monolithic and architectural. They lay naked against walls and on curbs, sometimes seedy and sometimes luminous.
Hee Jin Kang (*1974 in Seoul, Korea), based in Brooklyn, New York, came to the US with her Korean parents when she was three years old. In her other photographic projects like "Sandy’s Deli" (a series about her parents’ corner shop), she tries to depict the main issues in life through captivating seemingly meaningless everyday objects and still lifes. Hee Jin Kang has exhibited her work internationally, including at the Hayward Gallery, London, the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, and Culturgest, Lisbon. No Sleep, with an introduction by Jonathan Ames, is her first monograph.

»I’m interested in how these beds, although mute, allude to all the things we do on them – sleep, dream, have sex. Dumped onto the streets of New York, the mattresses are impermanent memorials to the city’s many private stories.« Hee Jin Kang

Authors: Jonathan Ames
Artists: Hee Jin Kang

Hardcover
22 x 27,3 cm
96 pages
60 color ills.
English
available
ISBN 978-3-86828-194-1
40 Euro
2011