In BOOMOON CONSTELLATION,, Daegu Art Museum, Daegu, 2013
This text is from the
conversation between artist and curator through e-mail during a preparation for
an exhibition BOOMOON Constellation
by Daegu Art Museum.
Your
full name is Kwon Boomoon, but you introduce yourself simply as Boomoon to the
English-speaking world.
My name consists of
three Chinese characters: 權
(kwon, authority), which is my
surname; and 富
(boo, wealth) and 問 (moon,
question), which were chosen by my father, and form my given name. When combined,
the three characters mean, “to question authority and wealth.” The
philosophical nature of my name has been a great personal influence throughout
my life. Naming is of particular significance within cultures that use languages based on Chinese characters, and in
my case, thanks to my name, I think I have carried to this day a profusion of
questions about the world and life.
I decided to drop my
surname and introduce myself as Boomoon to the English-speaking world because,
unlike how in Korean society one is always referred to by one’s full name in
professional relationships, some of the foreigners I befriended through work
would call me by my given name only, and this would reaffirm for me my initial
resolution as an artist. The publication of Boomoon,
my first monograph to be released in the United States in 1999, was an
important turning point in my life and my work, so I thought it would be good
to give myself a new name as I came into contact with a new world. I took out
my surname partly as an expression of my desire to free myself from the
shackles of convention that comes with family and social customs. A free mind,
fettered by nothing in this world, was the theme presented to me by my father
when he named me Boomoon, and in my twenties it served as the motto of my life
that I had inherited from him.
Why
photography? I’d like to know why you chose to be a photographer, and how you
started your career.
When I was little, I
loved going to the movies. We didn’t own a television, so I spent most of my
waking hours at the local cinema. Movies, as well as American magazines such as
Life and Look, were what allowed me to dream of other worlds beyond my given
reality. There was a time when I wanted to be a filmmaker, but to me moving
images were a distant, intangible medium. I always loved to draw ever since I
was a child, and joined the art club throughout school. When I was sixteen, my
father gave me his Zeiss Ikon Ikonflex camera, and I used it to take my first
still photograph. The process of trial and error through which I taught myself
how to develop negatives and make prints was absurd, but I was instantly
fascinated by the immediacy, which I had not experienced in drawing. A strong desire
to understand the world through images made me choose to become a photographer,
but that desire was a dream shared by many amongst my generation. The time had arrived when people could
pictures just as easily as they spoke. Photography has served, and continues to
serve, as a reagent, a cure, in my process of understanding the world.
I went to college, but
the experience was disappointing, which was why I indulged in the social
landscape on the streets outside campus. And thanks to that indulgence, I still
have photographs from when I was eighteen, nineteen. The product of expanding
my consciousness through capturing city landscapes was my first solo exhibition
titled Photo Poems, held in the
spring of 1975 in Seoul and then Daegu. It was a collection of images of Seoul,
Busan, and Daegu in the early 1970s, expressing the atmosphere of these cities caught
up in the heat of modernization, and of heavy oppression. At the time so-called
“realism” and “salon pictures” were dominant in photography, and Photo Poems was in part a declaration of
my rejection of such images. But it was a far cry from a presentation of my
ideas as topics for discourse. The exhibition was held as the result of my
disappointment in the predominance of amateurism in photography at the time. I
had wanted to wrap up my career as a photographer and move on to another medium
of expression. When the exhibition was subjected to severe criticism, however,
I instead determined to continue taking pictures, and have continued doing so
to this day.
In
the late 1980s, you began capturing vast natural sceneries without human
figures, and now the majority of your collection is landscape photography. What
inspired this shift?
I am no naturalist. I
had merely lost all curiosity in human society, and found myself standing
before nature. How do you explain the perpetual deterioration of human society,
if conscious intervention by a human being, a photographer in this case, could
improve and meaningfully impact society? I find the very notion delusional and
egocentric. Landscapes are like clouds in the wind depending on the state of my
mind and interpretation. Their presence could either be impossible to ignore,
or so inconspicuous that I would pass by without so much as a glance.
Landscapes are always in a state of flux. A landscape becomes an image through
my interaction with the world, and this process elevates my spirit. In my work,
humanity does not belong within the frame, but rather behind the camera as I
had been, facing the image unfolding before their eyes.
Contemporary landscape
photography consists mostly of cultural and social landscapes. Through images
of nature that do not follow such trends, you seem to pursue values that are
more fundamental in your landscape photography. In fact, the way you travel to
various corners of the world on foot with a heavy load of equipment, makes it
seem as if you were a pilgrim on a quest for a timeless truth.
Photography taught me
how to keep a distance, which is how one keeps oneself from being swept away by
the tide of the times, and gets closer to the essence. Photography demands that
a photographer not only keeps a physical distance between camera and object,
but also understands the position from which we view the world and to keep a
distance from what is obvious or deceptive. Persons who deal with photographic
images must use the power of recognition to render a familiar object
unfamiliar, and thereby allow the object to make a novel statement. And I
realized that the success of such endeavor relies not on one-time gestures, but
on one’s attitude towards life.
A “trend” had been the
product of discourse, but nowadays at a time when the speed of information transmission
is at its peak, trends have been reduced to the repetitive reproduction of
novelty. Even if a photograph is used effectively in all sorts of art carnivals
and various discussions, if the photographer refuses to follow trends blindly,
I believe his work will have nothing to do with what is trendy. Even the most
dazzling vocabulary becomes the cause of personal embarrassment after it has
been overused in society, eliminating not only its emotional impact but also
one’s will to ever use that word again. If one were to load an image with too
many concepts and excessive meaning that can only be limited, then the image
cannot take on a life of its own and survive through the many years to come.
There exists a wide
range of photography today, but the photography of my choice is all about the
joy of standing in front of the object of my work. Spiritual pursuits decoupled
from reality are not where I am headed. Travel, for me, is a method by means of
which I expand my life’s horizons.
This exhibition Constellation features eight of your
photography series, you have done since 1990s.
The prints will be installed in eight separate rooms, but in a way that
interconnects the different locations and times showcased through each series.
What was your intention behind the installation?
This exhibition was an
opportunity for me to realize an idea that I had for the past twenty years in
an actual space. In 1989, I held an exhibition at the Inkong Gallery in Seoul
with the largest C-prints in Korea at the time (124 x 180 cm), which would test
the limitations of the power of photographs as reproduced images. Not until as
late as 2006 was I able to make large-scale prints, and design my exhibitions
accordingly. Large-scale prints allow the viewer to see the image as less of a
text and more of a phenomenon, recreating the experience of standing behind the
camera the moment when the shutter closes. For my exhibition at the Chapelle
Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière in Paris in 1997, I experienced how
the architectural space of the exhibition venue and the photographed images
combined to create a new space, and began dreaming of making rooms of imagery.
The rooms filled with images are new spaces created from a collection of
experiences from real locations, and from the thought that the collection of
such rooms also gives birth to a whole other space and time, I named the
exhibition Constellation. In these
rooms, situations take place that are different from the pace of taking
pictures I had experienced on location. To hold an exhibition is to pursue such
unknown places.
Though consistent in their approach, these series
show subtle differences in terms of technique and aesthetics. In your opinion,
what are the intended and unintended elements that appear through your work?
My
work does not entail the realization of any preconceived concepts or ideas. For
me, an image is in itself an event that I have experienced. Images are brought
into the world through the filter of an artist, and sometimes taking pictures
has even felt as though it were my calling. Even the series To the Stones was not executed based on any collection of
preselected items, but rather chance encounters with objects that arrested a
passerby’s attention were rendered into photographic images, which were then
put together as a single series. However, the process of turning an image into
a work of art should be approached with great caution. In photography, the
final selection is just as important as the act of taking pictures. During that
process, the photographer develops a purpose or is struck by a concept for the
final set of images.
Overall, these series tend to feel static and compositional. The
near-monochromatic use of color in Sansu, Naksan and Byeongsan further emphasizes this characteristic. On the other hand, In the Woods and Northscape feature primary colors and vibrant tones, which, combined with a
near all-over composition, create a greater sense of materiality.
I don’t think of my work as being static or
compositional. Naksan captures
the ferocity of a blizzard over crashing waves at sea, with the brutal snowfall
threatening to overwhelm the frame. Color is a
phenomenon that occurs through the interaction of the light. I chose to print
my snow landscapes in black and white in order to eliminate the heat or cold of
color. The series In the Woods is the
product of spending time in the woods, and the intense green I experienced led
me to choose all-over printing. In general, photos of the forest focus on the
sensitivity of a forest, or present a variety of different forests. On the other
hand, In the Woods was a process of finding a certain harmony within
chaos. I like thick, maze-like forests that I can lose myself in. That
is because the greater the chaos, the greater the meaning of harmony found in
that chaos.
Northscape was the
product of my search for scenery that renders all words and meanings obsolete.
In the icy fields of the extreme north, one must abandon the conventional
standards and habits for estimating and interpreting space. There, one
encounters the fantastical scene of an absolute horizon, which simply
obliterates the scale of everyday life. At seeing the layers upon layers of
clear Northern Lights, as well as the indescribable form and translucent colors
of the drift ice, I stopped trying to clarify the perspective through which I
was reading the scenery in front of me, and I myself became a part of the
scenery and experienced the relationships between its various components.
The imagery used for On the Clouds is reminiscent of minimalist paintings, showing a
clear visual divergence from your other works. How is this interpreted?
Ever since I took up photography, I have always had a fixation on the idea
of the absolute horizon, which is a kind of subjective point of contact between
two spaces that leads to the realm of infinity. On the Clouds resulted from the pursuit of extreme simplicity
through the medium of photography. Clouds are objects without defined form and
the horizon created by clouds is in fact a mere illusion. Although my work may
come closer to abstract art than nature photography, I think that On the Clouds is exceptionally
photographic in that a natural phenomenon was captured as an image. The
convergence of skies from different times and places reveal a fantastical view
of the vast expanse of the heavens.
Featured in this exhibition is your work Stargazing, a video installation
displayed across 32 screens. Should this be interpreted as your interest in
other media?
Photography today is
not the same medium invented by Louis Daguerre in the 19th century. As
with other mediums these days, photography has been expanding at too great a
speed for one to insist on limiting its definition as images printed on paper. It
is important that photographers understand that the development of imaging
technology is an ongoing one. Photographed images are immaterial by nature, and
thus can be presented on any medium. Whether an image is projected on the walls
inside a rock cave, the screen inside a camera obscura, or a computer monitor,
I focus my attention on the different methods and possibilities of creating that
image.
Stargazing
is a sequence of still photographs of the night sky, juxtaposed and
interconnected into a single screen. In 2002 when I made the stills of On the Clouds and Stargazing into videos, I began my attempt to diversify the medium
of printing by using photoelectric element panels instead of the more
traditional method of printing on paper. The images of stars taken from different
spots around the world are juxtaposed to create a new time frame and new movements.
Through this movement of stars, which is different from that of nature, I attempted
to give the stars a new form that corresponds with the imagination and
experience of a person who sees the stars from the ground.
Stargazing is a tribute to night
skies of various shades and stars of glittering luminosity that never fail to
quicken our heartbeats and allow us to dream as we once did, in yearning for
unknown, ideal worlds. However, it seems our wounds today are too deep and
grave to be comforted by such dreams. What do you think?
The stars have always been
prominent poetic themes and are somewhat difficult to present through the
exacting medium of photography. Though it may seem that the times when we sang
about the stars are far behind us, look up to the sky on a clear night, and
you’ll see that the stars are still shining upon us. When
I ask myself just how effective are the provocative images intended to raise
awareness of the destructive aspects of our world, I am skeptical. I am
suspicious of the claims of ethical intent in capturing the pain of others as a
subject for press photographs, and often notice how people’s initial response the
pain witnessed fails to last. Was there ever a time when humanity did not
suffer from pain? Isn’t salvation about pursuing, in spite of it all, the
values of truth and dignity, about dreaming of eternity?
This exhibition was planned not as a retrospective,
but as an attempt to highlight your work as an accomplished artist in his
prime. What are some of the
changes that you plan to make or anticipate following this exhibition?
...
(translated from the korean by jayoon Choi)
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