Kim Jungman spent nearly a decade photographing what looks, at first glance, like an open forest of solitary trees. The sixty-two duotone plates in Can You Hear the Wind Blow give those trees room to sway, and the book takes its title from what the pictures ask of us: to see wind in the movement of branches, the drift of leaves, and the comings and goings of birds. The apparent wilderness is an illusion. The photographs were made between 2008 and 2017 and show a row of overlooked street trees in an alley between the artist’s studio and his home in Seoul.

That gap between the pastoral and the ordinary is the book’s real subject. Kim treats each tree as an individual, rooted but yielding, and the sequence accumulates into something close to portraiture. Nazraeli Press issued the volume in 2019 in a large hardcover format, 80 pages, with the plates printed in duotone; the scale suits photographs that depend on fine gradations of light and air. The publication accompanied exhibitions at The Hanmi Museum of Photography in Seoul and Three Shadows Gallery in Beijing, giving the book a connection to the exhibition life of this body of work.

Kim’s biography gives the project its weight. Born in Cheolwon, South Korea, in 1954, he moved as a teenager to Burkina Faso and then to Europe, studying painting at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art at Villa Arson in Nice, where he took up photography. Back in Seoul he became a prominent commercial and fashion photographer in South Korea, known for an edgy and often controversial practice. In 2006 he set that career aside to photograph the countryside of his native country, and the restraint of this later work is legible against the earlier renown.

For a collector, the interest lies in the collaboration between an exacting artist and a publisher known for the quality of its printing, and in a sequence that rewards slow looking rather than spectacle. The book turns a neglected Seoul alley into a sustained meditation on attention, and it holds that note across eighty pages.