Youngtaek Park (Kyonggi University Professor,  Art Critic)

 

Photography is to focus on given objects. It is to fix one’s eyes on the subject of photography or to make eye contact with a given subject or object. It is to observe and gaze at already intuitively existing objects based on the gaze of the subject who is conscious of being looked at and the work of thought that grasps it conceptually. Traditional Western representations also derived from an eye to observe and gaze at the world in the same context. The eye of a camera and a man cannot be seen as working in the same context and the camera’s lens inevitably works in the distance to gauge given objects. It is hard to take photographs without being conscious of something. It is impossible to produce photographs without objects just as it is difficult to discuss photography without taking into account the eye of the subject.

 

Sungwon Hwang’s pictures are in a bit of a different context. She presses the shutter when she is unconscious of what she sees or when she is in a state in which she is trying to be unconscious of it. These images were taken as she was walking and carrying her camera in her hands with the lens facing up. The pictures seem to snatch outside scenes from indoors. They were not taken by gazing at specific objects with her eye close to the lens; they were taken at random in a somewhat vague state when she was not aware of what she was seeing. They depict scenes that were inevitably captured in a state in which she could not refer to or gaze at the outside world.

 These photographs were taken outside on a street near her home and in her apartment’s garden. The scene featuring an apartment was photographed at dawn while the other pictures were mostly taken at sunset. They captured blocks of time when there was a certain degree of darkness or when light was shining through from somewhere, not in broad daylight. The artist states that periods of time enable her photography to capture light and shaking forms in a natural way. The difference in temperature at specific times also brings about different color senses. In the end, she manages to scoop up the world with light, color, and temperature.

 

The artist spends time inside and around her house. She looks at an exterior scene with indifference and captures a specific scene between the conscious and the unconscious. The apartment opposite her, the sky she looks at while lying down, and even the road lined with trees and the world around the park nearby her house come into sight. The heavens are the first thing to come into view when she opens her eyes in her room, and they have a different appearance every day. Sungwon Hwang has captured the heavens as if documenting it. Her photographs are scenes from every day and every hour, proving that she is alive.

 

As she passes time in the limited area she lives in, the artist slowly pushes her body into that world. She also generates a state in which scenes around her accidentally and unexpectedly appear as she walks with her camera. This world is one where she makes contact with things and experiences them with her own body, but it is perhaps not easy to sense this world in its entirety due to her being in physical pain. She is known to be suffering from severe pain due to an incurable disease called ankylosing spondylitis. The physical condition she faces—one in which it is difficult for her to sit or stand up due to pain throughout her entire body and properly regulate her body temperature—leads her to ponder such a state in her works. Accordingly, she continues to capture a specific object she comes into contact with in this limited space and displays images that reflect the state of her body caused by pain.

Instead of looking at objects with a specific purpose, her work resorts in her unconsciously giving herself to the scenes that penetrate her body and the objects she cannot grasp entirely with her consciousness and senses. This enables her to temporarily forget the pain. It also helps her to yield to her surrounding scenes without aiming at any specific object. It allows her to be bathed with the light from the world, being soothed within it.

 

Her pictures are tinged with specific hues and severe distortions and vehement movements bring about abstract patterns and line streams. Those factors arouse ambiguousness or vagueness in lieu of vividness or clearness. This way of making images uncatchable is also “a way of making them have the properties of an apparition”. The subjects are photographed by shaking her camera intentionally. The scene around her comes into either the camera’s lens or her own body along with the movement of her body.

An act of shaking images is an act of erasing images or “an act of rendering slashes on images”. It means doubting accuracy, clearness, vividness, truth, and representation. It is also her desire to shatter order on the surface of the world or to view what are behind it. Thus, objects that are completely different from what the eye or the camera’s lens sees come into sight all of a sudden. Her photographs that melt or shatter solidness, accuracy or firmness in realities are reminiscent of abstract paintings full of only colors, light, and innumerable lines. They are abundant with the taste of material properties engendered by crushed, stained marks, reduced to lights, colors, and lines. Perhaps, the artist seems to create pictures full of pictorial emotions in the present condition in which she cannot paint in her entirety.

 

The artist uses photographic devices to produce photographs that look like paintings. Her images fluctuate between consciousness and unconsciousness, the object and the non-object, being and non-being, light and darkness, and familiarity and unfamiliarity. They are indexes of the external world but are ultimately portraits of the world she sees and captures with the state of her body or her senses. They shake in indispensable connections between that world and her body. Included in her photographs are a world that repeats in time, me who can never be separated from that world, and the subject that is a recurring continuance in time. The reaction of an individual’s body that both sees the world and captures the world outside the body in pain is captured in photographs.