Sandy Kim’s lens is at once tender and penetrative, approaching her subjects with a gentle curiosity which is non-extractive but which reveals something essential about the person in the image.

This intimacy is nourished by her use of her own naked body as a tool of communication, her portraits of friends and lovers, and depictions of hanging out and going out which are so evocative of warmth and of fun.

Her relation to her environment is one of a diligent observer, extending to it this same intimacy, lovingly noticing and repurposing phenomena for her own humorous and irreverent ends.

The work, largely un-staged, seems to capture that which is already occurring, usually in private moments between people or in otherwise unwitnessed spaces, rather than anything brought about her instigation. This is reflected on the level of the viewer’s experience: we feel we are let in on a secret.