Exhibition Information

(출처= 예술공간 봄)

(출처= 예술공간 봄)

(출처= 예술공간 봄)

(출처= 예술공간 봄)

			I wanted to make the fragmented memories, which I encountered on the street of Sai Ying Pun for a moment in the early morning, into a recognizable form through the opening of optical unconsciousness like what Walter Benjamin said. The street photography has contingency and immediacy in a close relationship with the city. The objects in the photos, not included in a specific social network, sometimes show unintended meaning and beauty while forming a new relationship in the reality.

Photography turns the continuity of time into continuity of instantaneous space, and the combinations of chances may be connected as visual fragments, giving unlimited meanings. The bustling street of a city is an optimal place where unchoreographed, accidental and unrestricted images can be created. A street in its extended meaning is not just a place for a casual encounter with evanescent objects but a place that reflects the times and the flow of the society. Fading in our memory, photos are gradually turned from a specific sign that refers to a specific object to an abstract sign. I contain in the photos the visual information of the past through a young lady going for work, a puppy curiously looking at the photographer, an ordinary middle aged man in a convenient store, and the shops with the windows nailed shut with wooded boards in preparation of the attack by the pro-democracy protesters of Hong Kong. As time goes by, these images can serve as social records, gradually breaking free from the similarity with the objects, meanings and symbolic expressions.

I tried to recombine the fragments of the images revealed in the photos to create a tranquil order from invisible confusion, showing the social image of the times that is not confined within the general meaning defined by the discourse of the city. The people and places that I encounter on the streets are snapshots of the objects and their own patterns, unlike my intention. However, in a slightly broader sense, they are the choices beyond the common order restrictions. The photos were taken in a calm and quiet morning like an ordinary day, but the moment was like the calm before the tempest when the democracy of Hong Kong was urgently and desperately cried for.