In NAKSAN by Boomoon, Nazraeli press, USA, 2010 & BOOMOON, SASU & NAKSAN, exhibition catalogue, Hakgojae gallery, Seoul, 2011

Snow, Sea, Light

1

Long ago, there was a term in Zen Buddhism, genjô, which has been translated as “actualization” or “realization.” It refers to things manifesting themselves before our eyes as they are, appearing in a raw, unprocessed form. By all rights, the photographic apparatus was well suited to reproducing this ultimate ideal, the unadorned, unvarnished manifestation of things. But photography has produced no more than a mere semblance or pseudo-actualization, and all too often has degenerated into the realm of fiction where the “thing as it is” becomes “something it is not,” providing ample evidence of repeated disgrace. In its origins, photography was a gift of light, but today it indulges in the squandering of light. One of the inventors of photographs called them “words of light,” and for the people of that time, this aphorism captured the mystery of using light to fix an impression of a thing, a process that inspired awe. Today, “words of light” is dismissed as serviceable, meaningless poetry, a visual pattern with modest impact for promotional purposes.

Since long before photography, from the times when people worshipped the sun and were infatuated by fire, light has been used as a metaphor for truth and virtue. If people and things were not invested with light, they were considered to be of no value. The departure of light meant instant death. In time, as the metaphor of light was reduced to a cliché, the depth of darkness countered, serving to enrich the metaphor with gradations from light to darkness. Today, all of these metaphors have passed their expiration date, and light and darkness are no more than nostalgic signifiers of the empty shells of truth and virtue, self-parodies of what they once represented.

Can photographs still be words of light? Can they be the traces of things produced with light? Photography as a medium is entirely physical, verifying the thesis that the act of seeing things is nothing more than seeing the light reflected by the surface of things. A photograph can only reproduce the reflection of a surface. The radiance in a photograph is not the radiance of the thing itself. It is no more than a reflection of a radiance received from elsewhere. It is absolutely superficial. This is what we have become accustomed to saying. Nonetheless, the words of the 13^th-century Zen priest Dôgen resonate:

The Light that is so clear is the Light of all things in nature, the Light of the myriad plants and trees, not just their roots, branches, and leaves, but the light of their flowers and fruits. There is Light in the world of celestial beings, the world of humans, the world of animals, the world of hungry ghosts, the world of hells, and the world of asuras.[i]

It sometimes seems that an invisible light resides behind the colors of photographs of nature. Here, no distinction is made between what can or cannot be photographed, what can or cannot be seen. Dôgen’s “light,” as a meta-concept that encompasses its contrary, is endlessly expansive. Areas of shade and indistinctness are not uniformly illuminated, but rather all things in creation hold light in its various states, brightness as bright, darkness as dark, indistinctness as it is. The notion that light resides in all things was considered to be at the farthest remove from photography. However, photography is finally the exercise of a vision that, through the combination of art and apparatus has the potential of surpassing both, and technique that captures the ubiquity of phenomena with fairness and equality. If this vision and technique intertwine in a spiral of reinforcement, then we can perhaps begin speaking of the possibility of attaining a moment of the radiance inherent in all things. At that moment, the borderline between people and things is nullified in the midst of visible and invisible light.

The statement of the Master that “every human being is endowed with the Light” is not saying that the Light will appear in the future, or that it existed in the past, or that it is manifesting itself now to be seen nearby. We need to clearly hear his statement: “Human beings are endowed with the Light in their essential nature.” … To say “Every human being has the Light” is to say that all people are the Light. The Light is human beings. Having the Light, this becomes human existence or its foundation.[ii]

Likening people to light can be called the ultimate in pantheistic anthropomorphism. Or it can be recast as the mysticism that gestates within materialist, transcendent realism. Light inhabits all things, people are light. If this is so, then it follows that the quasi-merger that the photographer-beholder desires between the body and the photographic expression[iii] can also be found in photographs where people are completely absent. Such as BooMoon’s photographs of the seashore during a blizzard.

2

The winter sea that BooMoon photographed was so stormy it could just as well be called a sea of snow. The snow is constantly, imperceptibly, burying and sinking the landscape in a uniform whiteness. But the accumulating snow does not simply cover and hide the landscape, it strips away the cover of existing meaning that envelops the figure of nature. At times the windblown snow violently agitates the scene, but this agitation can also be seen have the same endpoint. The snow is making the landscape new. Thus, these photographs are therapy to restore the previously lost light that inhabits all things. The purpose of the snow and the surf is to bring about restoration. The snow and the waves are both white. The reason this seascape-snowscape suggests a scene of death is that a state of suspended animation is created temporarily to conduct therapy on the landscape.

With the barely visible horizon as the first line of partition, and the beach as a second, defined line of partition, the zone of the snow occupies the bottom half of the vertical frame. Thus the seashore, transformed into a uniform, absolute blank by the accumulated snow, looms before the body of the beholder and serves as a platform that blocks the movement of the incoming waves. The zone of the sea, being trapped in the pincer of the sky and the land, makes all the more clear that it ceaselessly generates the vigorous movement of unrestrained waves. Above this, the snow, whipped violently at an angle across the frame, stabs into the sea and into the beach. The crests of the waves that virtually strike out at the beholder, and the snow that chaotically excises the frame with innumerable long lines, coming to rest on the immobile stage of the white seashore, present the viewer with a powerful frontal exposure. The shore may be a “stage,” but it is entirely anti-theatrical. It has nothing to do with spectacle, of a type that would satisfy the visual desires of the general public. Rather it is as if the stage was built for one beholder alone. These are photographs for a quiet dialogue with oneself. The vertical frame, and the presence of the absolute blank “stage” at the bottom of the frame, circumscribe and clarify the fact that, at this very moment, the photographer-beholder is witnessing face-on the event taking place in this absolute zone. At the same time, the stage that stands on the side of the beholder becomes overt. In other words, it is a mirror. I confront myself as a landscape. It is a frightening, lonely mirror. There is just one mirror. There is one landscape. There is one I. Nothing else. Nothing will replace this landscape. No one will serve as my substitute or representative. The Naksan series is a place to encounter what Dôgen calls “the Light of the self,” they are photographs that corroborate this. I, in my nakedness, am simply looking, without any implications/with all implications, to wager on the continuation of life that connects the days, to obtain resolve. There is no one to help me. The only help appears as light. Looking at these photographs, I can’t but think that I have been given a place to completely immerse myself in a landscape, whether with heedless abandon or casual absorption. As if I am being guided by the dim but stormy white.

I am reminded that another BooMoon series, On the Clouds, was comprised of minimalist landscape photographs, with vertical frames divided between the zone of clouds below and the zone of blue sky above. These scenes above the clouds were faced head-on, as if in resistance to the fate of everyone tied to the face of the earth, and the photographs laid bare the locus of us earthbound viewers, immersed in that fate, paying no heed.

Naksan takes its name from a beach in northeast Korea that faces Japan, far over the sea. But the photographs construct an encounter for the beholders with themselves, wherever they may be, to reflect on the place they are in now, so the location is “nowhere.” Or, as was the case with On the Clouds, it is a universal “anywhere.” And, as far as the photographs deflate the self-importance of the viewer into solitude, they are always “just one place.” For me, there is only “this place.” I have no other place to be. But without it belonging to me whatsoever, I look at it, I am here.

Shino Kuraishi

(Translated fron the Japanese: John Junkerman)