Seung-Woo Back "Revised Ideals"
Gana Art Gallery
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Gana Art New York presents "Revised Ideals," a major exhibition of photographs from two series titled Blow Up and Utopia by Seung-Woo Back. Both series consist of images from North Korea, which more than 50 years after the Korean War, still remains a deeply isolated country and technically at war with South Korea. For many South Koreans who have survived this war and for the ensuing generations, this division leaves many difficult unanswered questions.
The Blow Up series was taken in North Korea, where the artist describes feeling as though he was on a set, a staged reality. The photographs are snapshots, capturing seemingly innocuous and mundane moments of everyday life. Yet given the rigid controls of the North Korean leadership and the strict censorship of all visual information, there is much more than what appears on the surface and is permitted to be photographed by a tourist. To assert his control and ownership of his images, which were censored upon his departure from North Korea, Back blows up certain parts of his original photographs. What had been kept out of sight now becomes the purpose of the image. Whether it is the children on stage, a smirking flight attendant or the back of a businessman's head, we now see that there is more than what meets the eye. Playing on the double meaning of "blow up" -- to destroy or to enlarge -- Back's eerily placid images address the tragic possibility but also the promise of utter and imminent destruction.
In Back's most recent series titled Utopia, he once again revisits North Korea, but in a very different way. He reworks recently discovered photographs of North Korea taken in the 1970s. These images, made by North Koreans for the use of propaganda, intend to show a country that has military and industrial might, along with technological and scientific advances. In another attempt to re-view the scene, Back divides and overlays these austere black and white photographs of institutional spaces in North Korea with flashes of beautiful colors that infuse an unreality to an overly real sterility of vision. In a twist of irony, Back is transforming an image that has already been manipulated. His softened and beautified Utopian images question the colored ideologies that leave a nation utterly divided.
Back lives and works in London, England and Seoul, Korea.
Media
Schedule
from September 10, 2009 to October 10, 2009