‘Flâneur’ is a French word meaning the person who walks the street idly. With a huge project to develop the city in the mid-19th century, Paris underwent substantial changes. Old appearance of the city in the Middle Age had gone and high buildings, wide roads, classy cafés, restaurants, and theaters came. As the entire city changed in its appearance, the livelihood of the people also changed and their lives started to undergo unfamiliar changes. The people who witnessed this phenomenon in changing Paris were called ‘Flâneur’, a person who takes a stroll, Charles Baudelaire who lived from 1821 to 1868 said. The city was not the space for people to live but just the landscape as the subject people looked at. The people who lived there became the spectators who took a contemplative view on the urban landscape changing while being separated from their lives. The work of Kim Hong Shik is to start observing and recording the change and movement modern cities undergo as this era’s ‘Flâneur’ and to study and understand the city as the place our modernity is realized.
 
The work of Kim Hong Shik is in the process to record the memory and trace which are between a city, a subject for observation, and ‘Flâneur’, an observer. The city in the modern society creates the artificial space for production & consumption, capital & technology, and policy & power. The consistent development of the city draws the continuous inflow of population. However, the city consisting of a large population group contains a lot of foreign elements regarding humans, which leads to the coexistence of alienation & disconnection and communication & harmony and the crossing of the subjective role and objectivity of human. The dualism of this city brings familiarity and unfamiliarity at the same time and brings attachment and alienation at the same time, and provides the sense of the loss and desire from the consistent interaction. The observation and record of city is to read the graceful border of the dualism or variety the city has and is to keep the modernism through artistic activities.
 
Observation of the city as ‘Flâneur’ requires objectivity and anonymousness. It cannot be special to experience the living with the livelihood in the city but if we take a objective look at the city in a distance, we find strange aspects we refuse unknowingly, small traces we pass casually, or the new aspect in very usual life we are likely to be accustomed and overlook. ‘Flâneur’ is not to observe and record with a special purpose but to catch the moment of the moving city continuously like taking a stroll and remember the appearance that is not distorted. City shares the time and space and carve the experience of the memory and emotion from the center to the fringe as does an observer from major position with objective eyes. This is why the work of Kim Hong Shik holds the artistic value rather than simple reappearance and record of documentary although his work is to observe and record a series of memory and phenomenon.  
 
Kim Hong Shik records the appearance of the city at first through camera. And then the city’s image recorded in an image is exposed to the film and carved onto stainless steel or zinc plate, corroding the metal. Corroded metal plate goes through the process to print the image into the paper again. In other words, the city observed through the eyes of the artist undergoes repeatedly positive and negative process through the production in the form of image, film, metal plate and printing materials but it seems that show the appearance and inner world, loss and recovery, hidden side and revealed side and the border between the hope and unstableness. In particular, in his work the metal plate is not a tool to gain the result but the proposal as a record of the city. Metal such as stainless steel or zinc is the material appropriate for recording objectively the city and although the surface is cold and heavy, the oxidation process is very flexible and contains the tolerance to carve the trace. Oxidized metal plate also contains countless space in various forms and value as a record that the micro space metal plate contains and the macro space metal plate expresses coexist simultaneously.
 
City brings the chance to create and terminate continuously to the modern people and as a result, feels the desire and frustration at the same time. The city Kim Hong Shik expresses becomes unfamiliar suddenly. This is why familiar experience is expressed in his work in a real way. Overcoming a little difference is to create the relationship formed invisibly in the city, to find the way to communicate with others and to find the hidden self.