Name:    Kyungwoo Chun Address:    Country:    Korea, republic of Web:    www.kyungwoochun.de Mail:    chunmanri@googlemail.com Telephone:

KYUNGWOO CHUN, South Korea, was born 1969 and grew up in the capital of the country, Seoul. He studied photography at the College of Arts, Chung-Ang University and then moved to Germany in 1995 where five years later he obtained a diploma in communications design at the University of Wuppertal. The same year, 2000, he went to Denmark as a writing journalist and reviewed the exhibition of his countrymen at the Odense Photo Triennial, “Standing on the Threshold of Time”, for a Korean Art Magazine. The theme for this triennial, slowness, brought him back at the Odense Triennial in 2003, but now as an artist and exhibitor. In 2007 he became artist in resident in Copenhagen, preparing what he has recently presented at the Aarhus Kunstbygning and Gallery Image and is currently showing in Seoul: the photo- and video installation project “Being a Queen” (2009).

POST POSTMODERNISM

Kyungwoo Chun and his way to a new slowness

Some years ago there was a Scandinavian boom in a novel-trilogy by the Norwegian writer Jan Kjaerstad. In its first part, “The Seducer” depicting the complicated history of development of a young man, the reader is repeatedly met by the question: “When do you become the person you are?” The question stays open and remain teasing for behind it you’ll find a far more basic question: If a human being can at all claim to have a core, or is nothing but a vague specimen, moulding itself after the actual surroundings and the current requests.

These questions inevitably come to you when, over the ten years he has been on the go, you look at the production of the young photographer, Kyungwoo Chun. But the question changes its meaning while looking: In the beginning you are the critical observer searching for coherence and significance, by the end of the period you find the artist himself formulating the problem and maturely come to terms with it in his work.

Kyungwoo Chun had his first solo-show in his native country in 1994: a collection of portraits so different in expression that a spectator may have difficulties in finding the common stilistic features.. With the prophetic title Aura it may look as if Kyungwoo has pinned down his principal theme, the aura, before fully having the personal and artistic qualifications to mould it.

In 1996 he changes his residence, settling in Germany, and this confrontation with a European culture bring new distinctive features to his production which look like considerations towards basic Asian way of thinking. The portrait series “Superiority” (1998) indicates the transition. The same year Chun begins a comprehensive sketchbook. Here drawn outlines for new photographic work alternate with photo-sketches and reproductions from the photohistorical basis for inspiration: The portraits by the pioneers with exposuretimes so long that head restraint was necessary. Among the many notes, put here by Chun, sometimes in German, sometimes in Korean, he has written down a (German) quotation in his own handwriting: “.. the headrest formed the plinth for the statue I was going to become, the corset of my imaginary nature”.

The exhibition, “Zeitraum im Verschwinden” (Disappearing Space of Time) (1998), seem to mark the turning point. In this series Chun for the first time puts the creation of the portrait on to the “model” who in that way becomes his fellow player when creating the “Zeitraum”, generating the picture of man. The people being portrayed maintain the core of their nature through the concentration on the image being created during self-imposed intervals of time lasting from one minute to half an hour. From the opposite angle the photographer opens his bridge of light to be walked on in the minutes agreed upon. Each portrait remain in the plate as a condensed life: birth, duration, ending.

A portrait of this kind can only be made between friends. Or you may reverse the order and maintain that if a portrait could be successfully created on these difficult conditions, it may certainly give access to other rich ways of socializing. It is most likely that kind of thoughts pushing the photographer forward towards his next commission: to create the rules for two people to act on the same negative but staggered in time. “Thirty Minutes’ Dialog”, premiered in 2000, holds an invitation for two individuals to populate the same space, one at a time, in 15 minutes, the result making them twins or lovers – partners in a multiethnic being together which for sure is fictious but put under the obligation of the eternal character of the arts. These are well-founded experiments with blurred images derived from the will to put one loaded moment on top of the next and continue in this way until the sum of moments raise the aura for the motivated spectator.

In the provisionally latest series, “this appearance” (2001), Chun in perfect control continues his longtime exposure experiments. Now only one model is present in the room but the duration, the visual dialogue between photographer and photographed, has been increased into one entire hour. A slovenly pronunciation of the title (as dis-appearance) creates a connotation similar to the one, the spectator gets from a superficial look at the browntoned portrait: you can hardly see that there is a face. But if you take your time (once more you meet this request!), the effect is striking: out from the amorphous semidarkness appears not only a face but THE face, as an idea. Look directly at the dim star and it disappears, look past it and it reveals itself – in this way you may get an eyecontact to the person portrayed, and lose it, reestablish the contact, and lose it. An oddly fragile meeting in a space you cannot define. As a spectator you leave the exhibit with a slightly wounded soul, but with the sensation of an insight of the rare type, only transmitted by genuine art.

Finn Thrane

(a slightly abbreviated and edited version of an article written for the solo-show of the artist in the Sungkok Art Museum in Seoul, South Korea, 2001).