The city we have known has
already disappeared; it no longer exists. The aspects and conditions of that
disappearance emerge as the symptoms of various problems that are being faced
by the city we now live in.
The "city" has long been a
favored theme within every form of contemporary art, but this is especially
true of photography. Perhaps this is related to photography's traditional
function as documentation, or perhaps the qualities of fragmentariness,
transience, and fallacy that are associated with the digital era of photography
provide a suitable format for addressing the ubiquitous change and disorder of
an urban landscape. In any case, there are countless images of cityscapes
proliferating in the field of photography, but this exhibition focuses on photos
capturing the special circumstances of disaster and redevelopment. With the
exception of war, disaster and redevelopment are the two phenomena capable of
transforming or obliterating an urban landscape with the most overwhelming
scale and speed. With this in mind, this exhibition poses several questions.
What is disappearing - either gradually
or overnight - from today's
city, and what is left behind in the wake of such disappearance? Can vestiges
of this disappearance be documented with photography, and if so, to what
effect? How does the anxiety associated with the incessant transformation and
loss of one's landscape
permeate the daily lives of the inhabitants of a city? Today's cities have
become so huge and complex that no individual can ever fully grasp their
meaning or operation. But in seeking answers to these questions, if we are able
to peek even momentarily into the hidden spaces of a city, it is thanks only to
the persistence of photography and its purveyors, who doggedly pursue their own
relentless investigations of the incomprehensible city. Through photography, we
can visit the sites where incidents occurred, wander through areas that have
been oppressed with duty and helplessness, and remember the city as it
disappears before our eyes.
1. Visiting:
Area Park
Area Park (b. 1972) has long
been interested in the relationship between the individual and the city as a
social system, as demonstrated in his series Part-timers (2001-2005), Seoul:
The Society of Gaps (2003-2004), Boys
in the City (2004-2005), and The Game
(2005-2006). In the photos from these series, which resemble documentary
photography in terms of subject matter and technique, Park revealed and
questioned the absurdity of hidden sides of Korean society. Now
living in Japan, Park has spent the last several years documenting the
aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown through his photography. The
Fukushima crisis began with two natural events—an earthquake and tsunami—but it
eventually expanded into a complex chain of manmade disasters related to the
ensuing social confusion, the political decision to block people's access to
necessary information, and the cascading resonance of fear and anxiety
triggered by that decision.
Rather than delving directly
into an incident with images that deliver a clear-cut message, Area Park
maintains a separation of both space and time. Like an explorer, he usually
works from the outskirts, whether his subject is a sea that has become a symbol
of dread due to the insidious presence of radioactive material, city streets
that are strangely vacant at 2 p.m., or random possessions abandoned in a burnt
school with no owners in sight. Through these subtle but arresting images, Park
unveils hidden dimensions of this bewildering disaster, which remains ongoing
to this very moment.
2. Remembering:
Area Park, Kang Hong Goo
Although Area Park and Kang
Hong Goo address their respective phenomena of disaster and redevelopment in
different ways, they each focus on vestiges that remain at the sites. The
vestiges may be things that were discarded or left behind by people, or they
may simply have survived their owners. It is the capacity for dealing with such
vestiges that makes photography the ideal medium for proactively remembering a
city. A predilection for vestiges is fundamental to the entire medium of
photography, since every photo is itself nothing more than a vestige. However,
the photos of Park and Kang use vestiges to communicate an implicit warning
about today's cities, built on the foundation of capitalist efficiency and
desire.
This
exhibition also features key works that Kang Hong Goo and Area Park produced in
the late 1990s and early 2000s, the period in which each artist began to fully
develop his artistic vision and craft. Kang's Landscape
with Fish (2001)
and Park's People
in Seoul (1999-2003),
both set against the backdrop of Seoul as it was fifteen years ago, traverse
the boundary between documentation and memory, or between social history and
personal experience, thus demonstrating how photography may be creatively used
to document and dissect a city.
3. Wandering:
Kang Hong Goo
For a little more than a
decade, Kang Hong Goo (b. 1956) has examined the ways in which residential
landscapes are transformed by processes of urban redevelopment. Beginning in
the 1990s, Kang used a digital camera and scanner to produce composite photos that
actively revealed the lightness and falsity of images, before incorporating the
theme of urban redevelopment in the early 2000s. He has established a distinct
style that combines photography's traditional association with documentation
with the fundamental duplicity and malleability of today's digital images. As
such, Kang's "absurd" photos manifest the absurdity of reality in the truest
sense.
Despite dealing with the
very serious and heavy subject of redevelopment, Kang's photos are
characterized by a unique atmosphere, as if they are hovering between reality
and fiction, criticism and enjoyment, seriousness and levity. Furthermore, the
meaning of his works emerges from the simultaneous tension and balance between
heterogeneous elements (e.g., documentation/memory, intention/coincidence,
fragments/panorama). To a certain extent, the odd balance that results can be
attributed to his photographic attitude of distantiation from his subjects, as
if he is attempting to negotiate the parameters of his role as an onlooker.
This attitude in turn reflects the complex mind of an artist: always an outside
observer who is helpless to change the situation yet cannot remain indifferent.
