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GREENSBORO - Don't look for Young Kim's artwork in museum collections or galleries.

It doesn't hang on walls or perch on pedestals. It can't be purchased, taken home and displayed.

It's designed to disappear with the brush of a hand, a breeze, or a whisk of a broom.

Kim turns his photographic portraits of people into life-size – and strikingly life-like – images created on floors, using two surprising materials: granular salt and red clay dust, or other earth.

"I am very much interested in making work that is highly fragile and transient, to reflect our own existence," Kim says.

Because he spends his days teaching photography at Elon University, Kim is little-known in Greensboro, where he moved in 2007.

But his salt-and-earth portraits have inspired awe at Elon and well beyond, including a mention in the New York Times.

The national buzz stemmed from his work at ArtPrize, an inaugural competition this fall that attracted more than 1,200 artists from around the world to Grand Rapids, Mich., to vie for $449,000 in prize money.

Kim evenly spaced 50 images of salt and red clay, each measuring 3 feet by 3 feet, over a floor space of 60 by 100 feet in a vacant warehouse.

Public voting propelled Kim's work into the top 25, but not the top 10. So, admirers donated $5,000 so that ArtPrize could give him a Curator's Choice award.

Kim, 39, learned of the award after returning to North Carolina.

"I was dumbfounded, delighted, humbled," Kim says.

Although Kim has exhibited his art at Elon and in other states, his ArtPrize entry represented his most extensive and ambitious work.

As word spread among thousands of ArtPrize visitors, "I am sure that more people saw this than any work I have ever done, probably combined," he says.

Kim is exploring other exhibition possibilities -- such as future ArtPrize competitions -- but has no definite plans.

His ArtPrize pieces are long gone, swept away, their 2,500 pounds of salt donated to a local farmer for recycling.

But his work leaves a lasting impression.

"I have been around a long time and have seen a lot of contemporary art, but I had not seen anything quite like this," says Steven Samson of the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, an ArtPrize sponsor.

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A large bookshelf decorates the living room of the Lindley Park home shared by Kim and Hannah Ross, whom he married two weeks ago in Costa Rica.

What's unusual is its contents.

The books are all dictionaries.

Kim's life story explains why.

He was 12 when his parents, wanting a better life for their three children, moved them from Korea to Clarksville, Tenn. His father would start a church there.

"Coming from another country, it was a real struggle for me -- the culture, the language," he recalls.

"Art gave me another vehicle to express what I was feeling."

Armed with talent and high school drawing classes, Kim entered Austin Peay State University in Clarksville to study graphic design.

He began collecting dictionaries as raw material for his art. "They contained all of the words I had grappled with," he said.

He tore pages from used dictionaries and attached them in a pattern to a brick wall, by taping an X of black masking tape through each. He hung a megaphone in front.

In graduate school at the University of Kentucky, he created rows of dictionary pages tied in knots across a white paper-covered floor.

"It was a way for me to illustrate my frustration," he said.

Granular salt made its debut in his first art installation in his junior year of college.

It depicted biblical themes, "the light of the world" and "the salt of the earth."

He covered an art department hallway's end window and floor with black paper. He re-photographed portraits from an old yearbook, then inserted them into small cutouts in the window's black paper so that light could filter through.

On the papered floor, he laid down a row of squares of salt, using a stencil to make each one perfectly uniform.

The experiment proved revealing.

He was amazed at how light shining through the photos projected them onto a wall. But he was distressed when visitors who walked into the dark hallway trampled the salt.

"The idea that work could be fragile, transient -- I didn't think of it that way," he recalls. "I thought people were destroying my work."

Photography played roles in other installations. In graduate school, he created a room-like space with sheer fabric, illuminated by a single light bulb. He fabricated tiny black boxes, each containing a reproduced photo of his first American classmates.

When a visitor opened a box and exposed the photograph to light, it began to fade away.

It fit with the installation's theme of memory. "We think memory is reliable, but it's not," Kim says. "It can fade over time."

Salt, photography and themes of fragility and transience played increasing roles in his work.

"Traditional art is meant to survive a long time," Kim says. "But we are all born and we all die, and I wanted to reflect that transient nature in my work."

He traces his interest in the theme to his early years in the United States, when classmates asked him about differences between his new country and his homeland.

"I am more interested in the connection between people, the shared experiences rather than the differences," Kim says. "The idea that we are all born and we all die is a universal element that we all understand."

His art also became more complex.

He began creating portraits with granular salt, with a black paper-covered floor beneath them to add contrast and detail. The first time he used earth to create detail was out of necessity, when a gallery in which he exhibited had a carpeted floor.

He relishes using materials with history and meaning. Some cultures and religions use salt in rituals, for example. As abundant elements necessary to sustain human life, both salt and earth fit the bill.

When Kim joined Elon's art department after teaching at West Virginia University, he impressed colleagues with his thoughtful, mild-mannered demeanor, his art and the meaning behind it.

"The salt, the photographically-derived image, the presentation in the space, the lighting, the scale -- all these things work in concert to express his intended meanings," says Kirstin Ringelberg, associate art history professor.

Assistant professor Evan Gatti agrees.

"I am still not sure how the work is made, but I have a pretty good sense of why it was made," Gatti says.

* * * * * *

That's exactly what Kim intends.

"I want people to think about why it's made, not only how it's made," he says. "I hope that people will think about the idea and the content behind the work."

But when viewers see Kim's work, their first question is always: How does he do it?

The process is painstaking.

In preparation for his ArtPrize entry, Kim photographed at random 100-plus people last summer in Grand Rapids, all with their eyes closed.

"It is a way for me to connect all these people with this uniform act," he says. Symbolism also plays a part. "It can imply contemplation, meditation, prayer, sleep, even death."

He narrowed them to 50 photographs. From each digital image, he created a silkscreen stencil measuring 3 feet by 3 feet.

To do that, he coated the silk with light-sensitive emulsion, then attached the digital image and exposed it to light to transfer the image to the silk.

The silkscreen acts like a negative for the salt and earth portrait that he creates.

His materials: 20 pounds of red clay dust and more than 2,500 pounds of salt, which he ordered in 25-pound bags from a surprised manager at a Sam's Club.

He used a frame to create a perfect bed of salt, one inch thick. That became his canvas of sorts.

Then he topped it with detail by delicately sifting the red clay dust through the silkscreen.

The result: a mirror image of each subject's picture, the clay adding a sepia tone quality that mimics vintage photographs.

He illuminated each with a light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

ArtPrize visitors were amazed. One photographer made it the focus of a YouTube video, in which he ranked it among the best installations.

Kim describes it as "very focused work" that he prefers to do alone, even though creating it is like performance art.

"You can easily destroy it or disturb it in the process of making it," he says. "Sometimes I catch myself holding my breath."

Yet he doesn't want his work roped off from visitors.

"I want them to be able to interact in a very intimate way," he says. "If they put a finger or step on it, it will inform them how fragile it is."

When ArtPrize ended, Kim laboriously swept away his weeks of work into feedbags. He says he is comfortable letting it go, to live on in viewers' minds.

"It's just how we live our life," he says. "Things unfold in our lives that only reside in our memories."

Contact Dawn DeCwikiel-Kane at 373-5204 or dawn.kane@news-record.com