Unusually, Flowers Gallery dedicates all of its substantial east end space to a solo photography show, enabling a monumental presentation of the mid-career South Korean Boomoon. The large ground floor gallery holds landscapes, and the two upper spaces have waterfalls. The former are wintery Korean views from the series Sansu (‘mountain water’ in Chinese), the latter are Icelandic cascades at Skogar. Together they make for a spectacular immersion in natural phenomena, due to both the elemental subjects and their scale of reproduction: some waterfalls are printed at over two metres high, and the forest snowscape Untitled #18134 is ten metres wide (that necessitates the use of six separate panels of glass which cast rather intrusive shadows where they join: a mis-step easily forgiven in the context of the whole show).

The obvious reason to be drawn in, then, is the splendour of nature revealed, unified by the various states of water displayed – from mist and cloud to driven and settled snow to crashing movement. It’s evident that Boomoon has put in the time and miles with heavy equipment to engage with nature in difficult conditions, in the spirit of, say, Thomas Joshua Cooper. Yet, though that operates well in that way, the show’s strength lies in three underlying factors.

First is the fusing of sublimity with seriality, most explicitly in the black-and-white waterfalls. In contrast with Cooper, who’s famed for making only one plate from each site he fixes on, Boomoon took 10,000 shots of the Skogar waterfalls across several intense sessions spent in the icy water at its foot. He whittled these down to 300 for a limited edition book; to 100 for a video presentation, viewable in the gallery foyer; and – in conjunction with Flowers – to ten for printing for display at 140 x 180 cm. Those ten are enough to surround a big room with black and white prints in which the images are edited in a counter-intuitive horizontal crop of the naturally vertical waterfalls. That emphasises their abstract qualities and – like the use of black and white – distances them from the conventional tourist shot. The minimalism only goes so far, though, for – more palpably than a river stepped in – you soon see that the same spread of falling water cannot be seen twice. Also upstairs are a pair of colour close-ups of waterfalls, pure water printed with such exacting detail that the flecks of white read as surface glitter.

Second, such a concentration of liquid surface naturally recalls paint: perhaps abstract expressionism or late Hartung. And it’s evident, looking back across Boomoon’s various series, that he often has painterly parallels in mind. The snowscapes, particularly two of isolated trees such as so easily stand in for a figure in a landscape, cannot help echoing classical Japanese ink drawings. Moreover, I suspected at first that some sort of scraping process had occurred, reminiscent of Gerhardt Richter’s methods. In fact, it’s the effect of wind-driven snow captured in its movement across the trees. That also brings a facture to the forms, triggering an analogy with Clyfford Still’s geologically jagged paintings.

The third underlying aspect is reflected through Boomoon’s background and location rather than being directly visible in the photographs themselves. His home city, Sokcho, is right on the northern border of South Korea, so he grew up in a politically polarised place. And though he has adopted the snappy abbreviation Boomoon, his full given name Kwon Boo Moon can be literally translated as ‘to question (Kwon) Authority (Boo) and Power (Moon)’ – and he feels that the denomination influenced his attitudes… Indeed, Boomoon’s earliest work was politically engaged and focused on the people now notably absent from his images. Put all that together and you can read the concentration on nature as an implicit critique of the world of man, and the use of border landscapes and depiction of transitional sites as a proxy for how natural wonders are corrupted or threatened by such human impositions as national boundaries as well as the more evident issues of occupation and pollution.

Overall, then, Boomoon delivers the sublime with a triple dose of added substance.  

 â€“ reviewed for Photomonitor by Paul Carey-Kent

Untitled No 2561, Seorak, 2010 © Boomoon, courtesy Flowers Gallery

Untitled No 355, Seorak, 2008 © Boomoon, courtesy Flowers Gallery

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Boomoon: Skogar & Sansu continues at Flowers Gallery, Kingsland Road until 25th June