In a time when we are indifferent to the production and consumption of images, Buk Seoul Museum of Art presents Lee JuYong Photographic Studio, an exhibition that represents the gradually disappearing photographic studio in the museum space.
Collecting thousands of photographs and cameras over the past 30 years, Lee JuYong considers early photographs as a record of society and culture of the time. He has carried out an archiving project that systematically categorizes the images. Through Lee JuYong’s photography practice that explores time, history, memory, and identity based on the archive, the exhibition attempts to communicate the meaning of portrait photography as an important image since the modern era, and tell stories of the people in the photographs.
Following the invention of photography, portrait photography enabled people of every class to possess their own portraits, which was once the exclusive property of the privileged class. In Korea, portrait photography was popularized in the early 1900s as photo studios emerged in the Joseon Dynasty. Taking the early photography studio as a motif, the Cheonyoundang Photographic Studio Art Project is an actual photo studio built in project gallery 1, and serves as a space for taking portrait photographs. Lee JuYong Photographic Studio also consists of People on the Road — portrait photographs produced using early studio photography techniques — in project gallery 2.
The Cheonyoundang Photographic Studio Art Project is a participatory documentation project of portrait photography based on the Cheonyoundang Photographic Studio, an important photography studio in Korean photography history. A studio run by Koreans, the Cheonyoundang Photographic Studio strove to spread and popularize photography since it opened in 1907.
Centering on the portrait photography studio for audiences’ voluntary participation, the project consists of early portrait photographs and portraits from modern times in Korea, China, and Japan selected from Lee’s archive. Lee’s recent work Memory of the Moment (2015) employs early photographic process. The Portrait Documentation Project will be undertaken by the artist with a specific group of people during the exhibition period.
As a backdrop for the photography studio, Lee placed a piece by Rhaomi Painting featuring pleasure-seeking moments(2016), which visualizes the universal hopes of human beings, such as wealth and honor, power, and the flourishing of one’s decedents. Juxtaposing various props in front of the backdrop, Lee represents the archetype of the modern photography studio from today’s perspective. Leading us to a fantasy world where the past and present coexist, Lee JuYong’s photography studio enables the audience to experience monumental moments in our banal routine and voluntarily records the special moments in our lives. Capturing a moment of a subject and fixing it on photographic paper, portrait photography might be a product of human desire as evident in portrait photographs from early photography history and in those from modern Korea, China, and Japan. These photographs might be a projection of early photographers’ wish to bring the practice of painting into photography, and exhibit people’s desire to show their existence and impose the eternal into existence. In this sense, Lee’s photography studio represents the here and now, and serves as a space for realizing the desires of its visitors while escaping from reality.
Lee’s Memory of the Moment series captures objects and spaces using early photographic processes of ambrotype and tintype. The series is suggestive of the activities of the Cheonyoundang Photographic Studio Art Project, which records the present moment in the form of the past. Additionally, early portrait photographs and portraits from modern Korea, China, and Japan recuperate the traces and memories of people in modern times when they lived in the mixed influences of the three countries. Through these images of the past, the audience experiences the past and the memory of the time. In the mixed time and space spanning from early photography to the present, the Cheonyoundang Photographic Studio Art Project talks about the history of human life, including our contemporaries, by bringing the past and its memory into the present.
Lee JuYong has mainly taken photographs of objects using early photographic processes that require extended periods of time and serious concentration. These works were attempts to find the inherent essence and archetype of objects rather than their appearance. Lee’s focus switched from objects to humans in People on the Road, a series of 21 photographs of sanitation workers produced through ‘Portraits Project of Public Service Workers of Seoul’ with the support of the Seoul Museum of Art and the Seoul Metropolitan Government Employees’ Union. Lee took portraits of people in the same occupation using traditional early studio photography techniques and attempted to extract each person’s individuality and project their interiority as well as appearance onto the image.
This exhibition is a significant turning point both in content and form in Lee JuYoung’s work. The Cheonyoundang Photographic Studio Art Project is presented as an open space that is completed by the participation of the audience. Taking a step further from People on the Road, the artist conducts a project that records the portrait of citizens born before 1932 who lived through modern and contemporary Korea. Lee’s new attempt is very meaningful in that he is beginning to create a social document of our contemporaries beyond the recording of our past history. Through the exhibition LeeJuYong Photographic Studio held in the Buk Seoul Museum of Art, we hope to offer an opportunity to appreciate the power of images as revealed in portrait photographs, and recognize the stories of the people represented in the images.
