Winter Mid-Mountain

Kim Suo was born and raised on the volcanic island of Jeju. As a child playing in the sea at Tapdong beneath Sarabong Peak, he remembers turning over rocks at low tide to find crabs and sea snails, cracking open sea urchins on the spot. Those memories are more than nostalgia. After spending his youth on the mainland, he returned to his hometown at the age of forty only to find the sea irrevocably changed. Watching marine life disappear due to development and pollution, he says simply: "The sea is dying." In those words lie both grief and an urgent conviction that what is old must be remembered.

In 1984 he left Jeju to study electronic engineering, worked at a research institute for six years, then enrolled in a college of Korean medicine. He returned to Jeju as a licensed Korean medicine doctor and currently runs a clinic. Coming back to the island was, for him, a reclamation of his place in life.

His serious engagement with photography began at Gangjeong Village. During the years when Gureombi Rock was blasted and construction of a naval base was forced through, he drove across Hallasan after clinic hours to the protest camps at Gangjeong, treating injured villagers with acupuncture before returning to Jeju City around midnight — a cycle repeated across all four seasons. One night, stopping his car on a mid-mountain plain, he was struck by the silhouettes of the oreum volcanic cones and the distant fishing-boat lights on the night sea, a scene of almost surreal beauty. Having witnessed the landfill of Tapdong and the destruction of Gureombi, he thought: "These landscapes, too, may someday vanish. I must capture them before they disappear."

That was the beginning. Nearly every day since, after clinic hours, he heads into the mid-mountain fields and oreums. From evening into deep night, sometimes through the morning dew, he records the volcanic island's landscapes. In 2022, he exhibited years of accumulated work for the first time — his debut solo exhibition, Land of the Gods, an initial public statement on the theme of oreums.

He gravitates toward the oreums of eastern Jeju's mid-mountain area; in the west, resort complexes and golf courses inevitably intrude into the camera frame. In the darkness and silence of uninhabited Jeju at dusk, he walks the island's fields alone deep into the night, seeking to capture beauty that is vanishing.

His second solo exhibition, By Reaching (2024), sensitively explored the cycle of life and the laws of nature through the four seasons and the life and death of Jeju horses. His gaze, which began with oreums, has deepened to encompass the creatures living upon them and the passage of time through which their lives unfold and fade.

By day he heals people; by night he documents the land. Kim Suo's photographs are born where those two threads meet. A deep and affectionate gaze toward things beautiful yet disappearing, toward beings living quietly — that is why his photographs move us beyond beautiful scenery to a contemplation of life and nature's eternal cycles.