Soohyun_Statement

In my photographs, I am acutely aware of the tension between a kind of clarity in “the thing itself” (as discussed by John Szarkowski) and a vagueness toward what it represents. The pictures often have a literal or figurative translucence, adding to or diluting intrinsic meaning. For example, buildings might be embedded in paintings, which are protected by glass. Images reflect off each other. Objects are redefined by each other, in the midst of an ongoing investigation of architectural space.  

Defined spaces or items — street paraphernalia, window displays — are turned into abstract portraits, but their true functional nature, and those of the places I capture — parking garages, horse stables — remain, like echoes. The real slips into the unreal, or surreal. At the same time, these depictions are also a conscious way of addressing personally poignant historical and cultural contexts and conflicts. 

The subjects of my photographs are drawn from concerns arising out of my immediate environment, first in Korea and now here in Chicago. In Korea I was trained over the course of a decade in an apprenticeship with a photographer who believed in traditional methods. I learned to utilize formal photographic elements to convey my innate response to my subjects. I was particularly concerned with capturing the social and political complexities arising as consequences of the fast economic development in my country and the controversial effects of the contemporary, capitalist paradigm.

My recent photographs in Chicago continue these same concerns and explore spaces of political and social tension. As a newcomer, I often wander around the city. I see traces of modernist, utopian experiments, for which Chicago was the testing ground, and yet their failure is often clearly thrown into contrast by a contemporary reality in which there is still so much injustice and inequality. As an outsider, I do not understand in which neighborhood I should feel safe or threatened, or where a certain neighborhood begins or ends. Through the photographer's lens, I delineate for myself the mystery and insecurity I feel against a backdrop of the wonder of being in this great city.