<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Read more of the Best and Brightest 2007 ***** She&amp;#039;s small and naked and human, and all around her is hard, cold, sharp, and dirty, and everything is in ruins.  We&amp;#039;re in some dark tunnel somewhere under New York City when we suddenly hear it coming from around the bend. Her clothes are in a pile, and she&amp;#039;s standing there in the middle of the train track and she yells, &amp;quot;Oh, shit!&amp;quot; and scampers barefoot out of the way while her sister grabs the camera and tripod as if we&amp;#039;re under a mortar attack, and the three of us run to the side of the tunnel and crouch down in the fetal position against the wall as less than twenty feet away the train thunders by.  When it passes, Miru Kim quietly gets up, dusts herself off, looks at the image the digital camera captured right when the train showed up, and appears to be very pleased with the shot.  Her sister gets dressed, casually looks around, and suggests the three of us go farther down the tunnel and set up at a different location.  The only light in this tunnel is coming from the storm drains high above and to the side, and we only have a couple hours of storm-drain light before it gets completely dark. I can&amp;#039;t see shit, and all I&amp;#039;m thinking about is dirty heroin needles. I don&amp;#039;t know what I&amp;#039;m stepping on as we continue walking deeper into the tunnel; I could have stepped on a body for all I know. Miru has come across a dead body once while exploring these environments, and I&amp;#039;m curious if she&amp;#039;s ever been slightly worried that she might become one. She says she carries no weapon -- no pepper spray, no Taser, no blade -- when she does this, but the fact that she gets completely naked is her defense, in a way, her naked body is her weapon: &amp;quot;If you think about it, if you see some woman naked in an abandoned building, it&amp;#039;s kind of scary,&amp;quot; she says. She then tells me a story about how she went alone into an abandoned train tunnel, and she came across a cool-looking section that she wanted to photograph, but the problem was there was a guy there who was taking up that particular space as a residency. He was sleeping and she didn&amp;#039;t want to wake him up, so later on when she went back -- again by herself -- to that exact spot and he was no longer there, she set up her tripod, camera, took her clothes off, and started taking nude photos of herself, and &amp;quot;he came in while I was doing this, he came in while I was taking photos of myself. I was totally alone, and this guy just completely walked in. I was so scared. That was probably the scariest moment. I saw a figure coming through the tunnel, and he didn&amp;#039;t have a flashlight or anything, so it was completely dark. So I see this dark figure coming toward me, then I saw that it was just this old guy who looked pretty harmless, he just lived there. So I dressed up and explained to him what I was doing -- &amp;#039;I&amp;#039;m doing an art project, sorry to bother you&amp;#039; -- you know? Because it&amp;#039;s like his house, you know? So I told him, and he didn&amp;#039;t say much; he was just standing there like, Okay. So I took off my clothes again and did it in front of him and he was kind of sitting in the picture, so I was like, &amp;#039;Do you mind moving forward out of the picture, please?&amp;#039; And he was just sitting around watching, so I did my thing, then dressed up. It was really filthy in there, real muddy, smelled like urine, and I was wiping off with baby wipes, and the guy was like, &amp;#039;Do you want my shirt to clean off?&amp;#039; He looked probably sixty or so, I&amp;#039;m sure he&amp;#039;s younger than he looks, and really skinny. He was really nice. Afterward, we were sitting around talking about his life. He kept on talking about Rikers Island, and that he likes it down there because it&amp;#039;s quiet. I told him I liked that, too. And then he was like, &amp;#039;Let me walk you out.&amp;#039; He thanked me for treating him like a regular person.&amp;quot; Miru is twenty-six. She says she&amp;#039;s an artist, not a photographer. Usually does this alone, but her older sister, SeungJung, is with us today because we needed a ride, since Miru doesn&amp;#039;t own a car. And Miru decided she wanted a model, and SeungJung would come in handy for that, too. Earlier that day, when I showed up at Miru&amp;#039;s place down in the Wall Street area of Manhattan, she was out getting prints made of some of her photos, but her sister was there to let me in.  They&amp;#039;re Korean, and when she opens the door, I see that she has no shoes on, and when I see the pairs of shoes down on the floor by the door, I ask if I should take my shoes off before entering. To my horror she says yes -- I&amp;#039;ve been traveling, and it&amp;#039;s been a couple days since I&amp;#039;ve changed my socks, and when I took a seat inside, I placed my backpack over my feet hoping that would somehow cover up the funk, but then when she cracked open the window, I had a feeling that it didn&amp;#039;t quite work.  While I&amp;#039;m totally stressing out about my feet, she asks me if I ever make fun of people I write about, or bash them.  I don&amp;#039;t really think I do, but I could maybe see how somebody might think so, and I&amp;#039;m wondering if she thinks I might do something like that to Miru, which honestly I didn&amp;#039;t plan on doing. Why? I ask. She tells me that she&amp;#039;s just curious.  I tell her that I&amp;#039;ve always had a thing for abandoned buildings and tunnels. Like whenever I walk past the boarded-up and locked Hibernia Bank in San Francisco, I always stop and take a look at it and try to figure out a way to break into that thing at night just to explore. I would take pictures, but I would not remove my clothing. But I am not an artist. She then explains to me a little bit about how Miru got involved in all this, and she uses a term that I&amp;#039;ve never heard before: &amp;quot;urban explorer.&amp;quot; She says that they&amp;#039;re people who explore tunnels and abandoned buildings. They are really hardcore about it. And that there&amp;#039;s an actual scene. Miru&amp;#039;s an urban explorer. She then goes on to tell me about how the previous night she went out with one of their friends -- this guy named Steve -- who&amp;#039;s like this urban-explorer all-star. It was his twenty-ninth birthday, they got drunk, and since he was closing in on the big 3-0, he wanted to do something he&amp;#039;d never done before, which was climb to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge, the only bridge in New York that Steve has never climbed.  So she and Steve go to the Brooklyn Bridge, climb to the top. After a short while, they climb down. She told me this whole story like it&amp;#039;s no big deal. I ask if they got caught. She tells me no, but once they got down, they did notice a bunch of helicopters flying all around.  She tells me that even though Miru wasn&amp;#039;t really an explorer growing up, she was always somewhat &amp;quot;subversive&amp;quot; and never really paid too much attention to whether something was legal or illegal. She&amp;#039;d just do it. This may have something to do with the fact that Miru came to the United States from Seoul when she was thirteen and was kind of on her own, living at a boarding school in Massachusetts -- it was a hard adjustment. After that, undergrad at Columbia, studied art at Pratt. Miru arrives, she&amp;#039;s dressed all in black, and she looks so much like her sister that it&amp;#039;s kind of hard to tell them apart. And I quickly get the impression that Miru is the quiet one.  On the table are huge prints of her work, and the pictures are strange and gorgeous. She finds beauty where there isn&amp;#039;t beauty, color where there&amp;#039;s not much color, light in total darkness. And always, in the middle of some busted-up and broken-down landscape of industrial-age America, draped on a bed of broken glass or the frozen relic of some giant machine that hasn&amp;#039;t worked in a century or tucked into some grimy alcove, is a small naked Korean woman. Miru. Or maybe her sister -- it&amp;#039;s honestly hard to tell.  Our original plan was to go out to some abandoned buildings on Long Island that she&amp;#039;s never been to before. But because of the hour, we decided to go underground in Manhattan instead. On the way there, Miru told me all about how she has visited the catacombs in Paris many times and created a series of shots there. &amp;quot;A good friend of mine is a filmmaker in Paris who is also one of the few experts on the catacombs. He guided me into all the hidden parts of the Paris underground. There is a substantial subculture based on the catacombs in Paris. They are called cataphiles.&amp;quot; SeungJung chimes in that they have parties down there.  &amp;quot;The catacombs, I find, are extremely addictive,&amp;quot; Miru says. &amp;quot;They can be very harsh -- wet, dark, rough -- but there is something so appealing about being in an entire world of underground tunnels and chambers. It&amp;#039;s so vast. Time moves differently down there than in the aboveground city. I have walked for eight to twelve hours and not felt tired or hungry. Only when I came aboveground, I&amp;#039;d feel dead.&amp;quot; When we get to a different spot in the tunnel, where the light is beaming perfectly at an angle from the sewer drains, she says, &amp;quot;I love that. It&amp;#039;s like a stage with spotlights.&amp;quot;  Miru sets up her tripod while her sister stands where she wants her to be, and surprisingly there&amp;#039;s cell-phone reception in the tunnel and the two of them are communicating to each other in Korean via their cell phones. I have no idea what the hell they&amp;#039;re saying, but the translation that comes to me is along the lines, &amp;quot;Move to the left, take a step to the right, are you okay with getting naked in front of this guy?&amp;quot; When the light and settings on the camera are ideal for Miru to take a photo, SeungJung slips off her clothes. Not quite sure where my eyes should be directed, I look away and stare at some of the graffiti that&amp;#039;s up on the walls here -- it&amp;#039;s like a hidden art gallery here in this tunnel.  Once she gets into position and I can hear the shutter click, I direct my attention back to the photo shoot.  When I heard about this girl who goes into the decrepit buildings and tunnels, I was like, So fucking what? What&amp;#039;s the big deal? Like, it wouldn&amp;#039;t surprise me at all if this month&amp;#039;s Vogue has a photo spread of some expressionless size-double-zero model in couture fashion, all dressed up in some decrepit urban setting as a backdrop -- oh, the juxtaposition!  It&amp;#039;s been done, and done a million times. What makes what Miru does any different? She tells me that what she does is not commercial, and aesthetically it&amp;#039;s not fashion photography or even nude photography, and that it&amp;#039;s not really about the figure, but the relationship between that figure and the space.  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s also more narrative, more poetic. The female figure in the pictures, it&amp;#039;s kind of a ghost. . . . I like the idea of these places being haunted by a ghost figure or a wild child or something, like this person who is the last person on earth.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;ve seen plenty of Van Goghs in various books, postcards, and publications, but it wasn&amp;#039;t until I was in Amsterdam and went into the Van Gogh museum and viewed them with my own eyes that it became art to me. (Granted, I went to a cannabis caf\u00E9 beforehand.) But now, watching Miru work, setting up the tripod and explaining to me what she&amp;#039;s doing, with the sewer light making her hair shine as she imagines the picture, I begin to see the art of it. Miru had a professor at Pratt &amp;quot;who was really into feminist art, she was a feminist artist in the seventies. She kept trying to read a feminist statement into what I am doing. She was like, It&amp;#039;s about these harsh, male, man-made industrial environments and you&amp;#039;re this perennial female figure that&amp;#039;s vulnerable.&amp;quot; Then this professor asked Miru what she was trying to say with her art, and with a laugh she tells me that her answer was, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not trying to say anything.&amp;quot; While her sister is fiddling around with her iPhone, I ask Miru if she&amp;#039;s ever been accused of being somewhat of a narcissist, since if you think about it, taking photos of yourself is somewhat narcissistic behavior, and she tells me no, and that the only reason she did that is because she didn&amp;#039;t have a model. &amp;quot;I started in Berlin,&amp;quot; she says, where she attended the University of the Arts as a guest student for a semester for painting and conceptual art, where she mostly hung out with graffiti artists. There she became friends with people at the Berlin Underworlds Association, which is a very formal organization that does guided tours of former bunkers and tunnels.  Some artists she met were living and working at a former asylum that was bombed during World War II.  &amp;quot;They gave me access to their basement, which was totally fantastic. It was a huge catacomblike underground structure that had roots growing everywhere over old bricks. . . . It looked cool, so I went in there and I started shooting, but I wanted to put something else in there, other than this space, a figure, a living thing.&amp;quot; So that&amp;#039;s how it happened. She took her clothes off and started shooting.  We continue walking down the tunnel when Miru tells me that she&amp;#039;s never been this deep into this particular tunnel before, and she pulls out her cell phone to call Steve, and I hear her ask, &amp;quot;Where&amp;#039;s the exit out of here?&amp;quot; We continue walking when several hundred meters in front of us we see a lone silhouette of a man walking toward us, and he&amp;#039;s holding something in his right hand. I point this out to them, and there&amp;#039;s some confusion as we all can&amp;#039;t seem to figure out what he&amp;#039;s holding, and before I can even ask what we should do, like if maybe one of us should hurry up and get naked or something, from behind we hear another train coming at us full speed.  Best and brightest 2007: At twenty-six, Miru Kim has photographed herself in industrial ruins and tunnels all over the world. She says she&amp;#039;s not a photographer but an artist, an urban explorer. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a3920/mirukim1207/>