"To me, photography really means painting with light.

The things, surfaces and colours that surround me are not plain objects, that I capture and depict,

but the palette from which I  create my abstract paintings.

The spirit of the place, of the moment, becomes a living visual narrative.

Discovery of spiritual curiosity through photography

This is the task that I set myself with my works and which I am faceing over and over again. A small section of a cracked wall, crumbling and full of weathered colors grows into a picture that can be more: A narrowing gorge? An aerial view of a canyon? The satellite image of a sea bay? I scale the object, and let the viewer fly, and discover parallels between the microcosm and the macrocosm, between the short life of a person and the long life of a planet. This mission runs through my entire work, regardless of motif, technique or format.

My vision: see small things, feel big things.

This is my promise to the viewers: I take them through my pictures on the same journey that I am on when my works are created: I find small, insignificant, hidden objects, filter and amplify them, detach them from their usual context, and bring them to a new, greater meaning. In a new format, turned into art and exhibited, these objects begin to stimulate and talk in an imaginative way. Seeing small things and feeling big things is like a spiritual added value, on an immaterial, mental level."

Seung-Ja Kim is born in South Korea in 1969.

After completing her photography studies at the Seoul Institute of the Arts, she moves to Germany. There she graduates in photo design and media art from the Bielefeld University of Design.   After graduating, Seung-Ja Kim teaches photography at Handong University, South Korea. She then returns to Germany to complete a postgraduate course (MA) at the HfG in Karlsruhe.  After graduating, she gets married. Seung-Ja Kim-Leutiger has two children, and now that they have grown up, their artistic life is picking up speed again.