Photographs Read, Photographs Sensed
The history of the camera is traced back for more than one century already. As high-performance digital cameras rapidly spread recently, the camera is no longer a luxurious item for the general public. By using this camera, we capture all objects in our daily lives. The photographic images we have taken are shared by all through online mediums. As we grow gradually more interested in photography, photography is given with another meaning beyond the function of simple recording through the processes of modifying and editing images.
Along with this social phenomenon, in a recent few years, mid-career blue-chip photographers in their 40s and 50s distinguish themselves through their international activities. Photographic theoreticians who studied abroad debate issues of photographic art. The major art museums at home and abroad often hold enormous scale photographic exhibitions to shed light on the true nature of photographic art, and primary galleries and collectors purchase photographic works at high prices. This exhibition aims to raise productive discourses on contemporary art by embracing, reading, feeling, and communicating with photographs from new perspectives, departing from the previous point of view.
If briefly reviewing the history of Korean photography, in modern Korean photography an idea was to pursue its independent existence and value to escape from painting. The theories of modern photographic aesthetics were able to keep photography from external impeachment, but they sometimes hampered the expansion of a photographic sphere and improvement of liberal expression. In the 1960s, contemporary photography began refusing all restrictions, embracing new perception and senses that are unimaginable from established perspectives and techniques. The standard to interpret reality and the senses to feel objects have changed. At that time, journalist-turned-photographers and amateur photographers entered in artistic work and continued their artistic photographs up to the 70s and 80s. Directly or indirectly influenced by the conceptions of contemporary photography that addressed a wide variety of photographic genres such as documentary photos, portrait photos, commercial photos, and celebrity photos, they grew and discussed the contact point of photography and art.
Since the mid-1990s, young contemporary artists in the fields of painting and sculpture were captivated by photography's mechanism and documentary quality and thus actively exploited it for their work. Their works were displayed at major museums and large-scale galleries. It is recorded as a significant turning point in the history of contemporary Korean photography. The tendencies photography accepted other genres and other genres embraced photography appeared from the late 1990s up to today. Photographs produced through diverse mediums and techniques opened up a new horizon in contemporary photographic art. Since then, contemporary Korean photography was not regarded as something separate from contemporary art but is seen as an extension of contemporary art, forming the forum for productive discourse.
In this show outstanding artworks by eminent photographers are diversely recomposed and displayed. This exhibition is meaningful in that it aims to enhance the viewers' understanding of contemporary photography by providing them with the opportunity to have a new perception of it and to shift their conception.
