HEESEUNG CHUNG

so close and video work Landless, presents new possibilities for contemplating the photography medium within the artist’s vibrant sensibility.

In preparing for the exhibition, Chung explained that she often recalled the words of Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, where he wrote, ‘Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.’ This offers an excellent expression of Chung’s perspective toward landscapes and the forms of life imbued within them. Her work is designed so that viewers ‘lose their way’ and seek out new possibilities through encounters with random presences. In the process, she asks the question, ‘Can photography think?’

With each exhibition, Chung selects one clear theme that she explores in a consistent and incisive way. She goes beyond simply producing images to suggest a form of contemporary practice: ‘thinking through photography.’ Remembrance has a rear and front (2018), which was featured at the 12th Gwangju Biennale, was an experimental attempt to use large-scale printing and pronounced texture to visually represent the vibrating state where history and the present intersect. Dancing together in a sinking ship, which was presented at the 2020 Korea Artist Prize exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, used a complex installation of photography, text, and music to show the lives of contemporary artists and their relationship to art amid their various real-world struggles.

The title of this exhibition and the series Wilder draws upon an archaic word conveying the sense of ‘losing one’s way.’ It took inspiration from the artist’s perception of the forest as a place of endless details and unfathomable density, where she would herself get lost. Chung mentions having taken long walks in the forests of Jeju Island while preparing for this exhibition, gaining a full sense of their different places in this way. In the process, the hierarchy between her photographing self and her forest subjects became blurred, as she experienced the contradiction of endless psychological possibilities opening to her in a geographically isolated setting. Single images are developed at scales of over two meters in height and separated into two panels, which are arranged at regular intervals in the gallery with uniform spaces in between. Delicate one-centimeter cracks in a given work serve as devices to accentuate the photograph’s symbolism along with the differences from reality. Through the act of venturing into the fissures and losing our way in the space beyond, we finally come to enter the forest and appropriate a ‘place of densely clustered silence.’

The series Faraway, so close incorporates the utter contingency of nature, including elements of time, weather, and the environment. In a departure from Chung’s previous studio-based approach with works such as Rose is a rose is a rose (2016), she draws here on uncontrollable external elements, where her lens resonates with the randomness of the world. Captured in high resolution, her images focus less on revealing the details of her objects than on raising questions about what we believe ourselves to ‘see.’ The work Landless occupies a place between photography and video as it calmly observes a boat floating in the sea and the endless surrounding movements of clouds, water, and people. The work’s random aspects and the spontaneity of its music exist in disparate parallel, offering a fleeting experience with the free world etymologically imbued in the concept of ‘nature.’ In this way, Heeseung Chung encourages us to perceive the image not simply as the interpretation of a reference but as an assemblage of endlessly shifting presences.

Heeseung Chung lives and work in Seoul, Korea. She receives BFA in Painting at Hongik University and two degrees BA and MA in Photography at London College of Communication, London. She was awarded the 11th Daum Prize in 2012 and was selected as a finalist for the 2020 Korea Artist Prize exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. In 2023, she received the inaugural Ralph Gibson Award in Korea. Through her diverse body of work, she has solidified her recognition as a leading figure in Korean contemporary photography. She has participated in exhibitions major art institutions such as Ilmin Museum of Art (2021), Art Sonje Center (2013), Leeum Museum of Art (2014), Seoul Museum of Art (2014), the 12th Gwangju Biennale (2018), and Belfast Photo Festival (2019).

Courtesy of Gallery Baton