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TEXT - ±ÛÀбâ
TITLE : Shino Kuraishi, "Boo Moon Kwon", 2002
DATE : 08/22/2011 23:17

In BRINK : 100 PHOTOGRAPHERS, 10 CURATORS, 10 WRITERS, Phaidon Press, London, 2002

 

Boo Moon Kwon

 

In the 1970s, Korean Artist Boo Moon Kwon was active as a documentary photographer. With solid technique, in black and white, he portrayed Korean young soldiers on duty under tense cold war conditions and amongst ruins of southern Korean villages. Since the 1990s, he has given up the conventional grammar of documentary photography in order to redefine nature and landscape in colour. His subjects are jungles, deserts, mountains and seas which he photographs in a simple manner by eliminating as many superfluous elements as possible. His minimalist strategy is especially evident in his 1996 series of the open sea, shot from aboard a ship from a bird’s eye view, and the 1997 series of clouds and skies, shot from an aeroplane. Since then, his minimalism has further intensified, as he exploits various ‘unfree’ situations – shooting shorelines and forests from a train window along the trans-Siberian railway, and mountains and seas at night.

 

What motivated his return to nature was a creative desire to represent nothingness. To achieve this goal, he does not ironically express lack of substance, but positively embraces nothingness, revealing his kinship to the philosophers Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi. His minimalist landscapes embody his epistemological critique of the artifice of modern civilization as well as the western rationalism that created and maintained it. However he is keenly aware that his critique was made possible by photography, the visual apparatus produced by modern civilization. In other words, Boo Moon Kwon, paying little attention to the conventional aesthetics that govern the printing and resolution of images, accepts the essentially ‘non-artistic’ feature of photography that enables the unlimited, mechanical production and consumption of images. At the same time, he uses the same feature to advance something impossible in today’s world: the contemplation of nature.

 

Shino Kuraishi


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