May-2016
HyongRyol Bak: Slow-Drawing
July 2 – September 25, 2016 | HyongRyol Bak | Slow-Drawing
Organised by Atelier SHL in collaboration with GoEun Museum of Photography and The Manuel Rivera-Ortiz Foundation For Documentary Photography & Film
Arles, France Exhibition
Introducing Arles and Europe to the work of Korean photographer HyongRyol Bak, Slow-Drawing showcases his latest work Figure Project – a series aerial views taken after the artist applies physical alterations to ordinary objects in nature.
Bak’s work is a reflective attitude toward nature suffering from civilization. His previous work Captured Nature was a metaphor of human civilization retrogressing nature by shooting natural forms that are artificially seized. Figure Project connects with the behavioral side of this previous work where Bak creates the situation and nature is the main object.
Bak intervenes and transforms nature to sculpture that has perfect straight lines and side divisions which cannot be seen in nature. Adding sculptural characters to the form of the land, the aerial views erase the perspective and spaciousness of these characters, hiding their absolute scale. They emphasize photography as a two-dimensional medium and create an illusion of looking at a flat surface painting.
Figure Project captures the characters that still exist yet with no individuality in the space where sides and lines are completely filled. This series fulfills dual roles where each individual performs the sculptural form and resists the theatricality of it at the same time. This point actively reflects the artist’s question of how the nature could be accepted and existing in human awareness and the society. Thus, Bak himself adds his performance to the abandoned land and reinterprets the value of the land that was classified by the value of a human being.
Bak expresses a human’s egoistic desire of domination through the forms of site-specific art and then records it. Where the role of photography is limited as the demonstration of action in his previous work, Figure Project uses photography as an aesthetic device that recomposes his work. It therefore maintains the function of expanding his way of working. HyongRyol Bak newly interprets the desire of human towards the nature through his various experimental ways.
