SEUNG JAE KIM


Existential issues on photography

In each trial, each project, I introduce optical, physical and social alterations that work between myself (the photographer), and my subject; Also each project simplifies those changes by magnified specific events. My works are creating scenes to see how the visual recognition functions on existence.
I thought about a role of photography in this issue as a media that I’ve worked with more than a decade. Which can record vision with less emotional interfere (technically), and create some changes. But these changes are not so clear to be understood because photography mimics human vision. Furthermore, we mix our memory, imagination and photographed image all together. Even we sometime confuse a friend in a photograph and the memory when we saw him first time. So photography can’t reveal these changes by itself. In my works, on the contrary, photographs bind things that we think they are not together. In other words, it makes a symmetrical point of correspondence with changes in my sense. I try to interact or penetrate with that visual and time space by making secondary photo-documentations based on prejudice and absolute trust about photography through physical manipulating in front of myself with camera. To accomplish this, I mostly use life size photographs on pink boards planted on the ground, and figures that resist gravity- into the frame. While these introduce elements of humor to the work but it also generates an image with its own visual field.