BYUN SOONCHOEL

To Byun, a photographer immersed in portraiture, the figures in front of his camera are more than just subjects. In the aspect that the people he has observed and handled represent both period and society, his method of shooting may be seen as typological, while the perspective and attitude within show roots in sociological methodology. Because typological portraiture most often objectively handles those within a certain group, it naturally captures the social culture and history of that time. Byun’s works, through typological suggestion of repeating analogous language and sociological methodology searching forthe theory behind social relations in the common denominator of represented images, offer amusement in a look into human psychology, not easily exposed at the surface, but lying beneath. The assembly of people silently captured by his lens reveals more than what is simply shown: his attitude toward society and worldview, as well as his particular issue awareness.

The 나의 가족 Eternal Family series was a great step forward for the artist through trials with new technological language in the typological portraiture and sociological methodology that he has long since been in pursuit of. Its methods are still based in the documentary-like recording of typological portraiture, but surprisingly, virtual people lacking the ‘indexical’ nature characteristic of photography coexist within. The fact that its subject matter dealt directly with North Korea, a subject that is innately difficult or uncomfortable for Korean people, is especially interesting. 나의 가족 Eternal Family is a series about displaced families, comprising portraits of people who fled North Korea to the South. Its subject of displaced families encompasses more than just the linguistic meaning of the term in Korea, the sole country in the world still suffering from the pain of a country divided. Through the medium of photography, the artist virtually reunites displaced families who can neither see nor meet one another.

The production process is as follows. First, through the Red Cross, the artist found candidates who were still keeping their family portraits. Though the number of possible candidates was drastically lower than expected, he brought each one of them to his studio and shot them against a blank background. At the same time, the Center for Imaging Media Research at Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) took the displaced families’ old photographs and converted them through ‘3D aging technology,’ so that the young parents or siblings in the resulting photographs, the years now added to their faces, could once again greet their aged displaced family members in the South side by side. As a result, the 나의 가족 Eternal Family series enabled the simultaneous address of the material timeliness of handling the virtual and the real together with the issue awareness of the long-standing photography discourse on memory and record. By at once facing reality head-on and presenting it accordingly through photograph as an expression of humanity’s shared and repressed historical wounds, it may be seen as the artist’s own worldview and attitude of healing and discussion.