ThereAfter

My artworks in this exhibition explored two themes in the form of triptych, which is a work of art that is divided into three sections or images. The first one is titled ‘ThereAfter’, featuring images that show the different changes an object goes through over time, while the second is titled ‘Same Walls’, which portrays varying perceptions of the same object in the same place according to the viewer’s perspective. The images in the two artworks were taken on the old, abandoned streets near Euljilo, located in the center of Seoul in South Korea.

The creation of ‘ThereAfter’ began with a focus on plants along roadsides that breathe a sense of liveliness into fading spaces. In just a few days, however, when the weather was changing from fall to winter, all those traces of life suddenly and dramatically withered. My sensory organs become more sensitive when I see life dying around me while experiencing direct or indirect fear of death after a severe childhood illness. I photographed the changes that the plants were undergoing at one month intervals until the following spring, so I could identify the plants that put forth shoots again and the others that disappeared. In each artwork, the images on the left are form late fall; the images in the center are from mid-winter; and the images on the right are from the following spring. I needed to pay careful attention while taking these photographs because the angles and backdrops had to be exactly the same in order to make the comparison among the three images clear. I regard such changes as an allegory of human life.