INVISIBLE EXISTENCES

“I’ve been documenting subjects that we don’t see, but exist as we breathe.”

I started my photographic practice at Seoul Institute of the Arts in 2019 and now I’m majoring in Fine-Art Photography in Glasgow School of Art. Photography was a great tool to capture a moment through continuous time. I started capturing the best moments of people and scenery that came to my eyes. In the beginning, I mostly focused on visual beauties or footage of specific memories. However, as seeing my pictures piled up, I wasn’t able to find more meanings of my practice in terms of art. My images could be great commercials, but not a destination that I’ve looked for.

In order to break boundaries that I was locked in, I needed to understand my subject matters including myself from a variety of aspects. Then I realized photography is not a capturing tool but a methodology for communication. As trying to understand more about my subjects, I gained more diverse narratives and visual outputs that are not superficial. My next practice was to learn methodologies in terms of photography technic. It was a necessary process because photography is based on camera mechanisms, unlike drawing or painting. I started gaining various photographic skills in order to visualize concepts and narratives in my imagination.

For an instance, long exposure technic has been one of the most interesting approaches. In general, photography is known for a result of a decisive moment through continuous time. However, long exposure compresses continuous time into a single frame. If viewers see a still image taken with an eight-hours of exposure, it is a gate for viewers to experience the consecutive moments that exist but is invisible as dissolved in a single image.

Now photography became a tool to communicate, and also a tool to illustrate experimental possibilities for my projects.

I’ve been documenting subjects that we don’t see, but exist as we breathe. Therefore, my images are abstract, and I want to put my hidden questionaries beyond the abstract. All of the experimental photographic practices taught me how to break the stereotype of traditional photography, and also how to go beyond new photographic possibilities. I use photography to visually retrieve my desire and ego. This is not a passive act of capturing what comes to my sights, but an active engagement of creating narratives utilizing various mediums. In order to strengthen my artistic practice, I adopted non-photography-based mediums and genres such as sound, video, installation, or even performance. I lighted myself in a lonely room, became naked to assimilate into nature, or used a sound trigger to capture vocal emotions. All experimental practices aim to interpret invisible existences around me into visual evidence. My traditional photographic practice brought me pleasure, however, now the mixture of artistic practice makes me erupt into catharsis.

All the images I create started with my personal experiences. And as I share my private narrative with others, the boundary gradually expands to people around me, groups, and communities in contemporary society. I believe art is a way to give viewers new perspectives to see the world differently by raising intriguing questionaries rather than giving answers. I hope the visual outcomes I create will work as an effective catalyst for my viewers to stimulate their curiosity and to give them a chance to think about what it means to live in a contemporary world with various invisible existences.