Occupying Nature

Hyong-Ryol Bak is an artist who uses the medium of photography to explore the relationship between object and society, as shown in his works Working People 1 (2006), Working People 2 (2007), and Well Being People (2009). In Working People 1, he took portraits of people in different occupational industries and levels in the work setting, but by separating the worker and working environment. Bak attempted to capture the essence of the worker while still existing within the framework of the working space. For his second installment of the series Working People 2, he symbolically expressed the diminishing identity of individuals in different occupations and social standings, in photographic portrayals of people holding their funeral portraits. In his later work Well Being People, Park shows satirically alluding situations of modern people’s yearning for increased quality of life. With time, the artist’s interest shifts from the relationship between the individual and society, to a deep reflection on the relationship between man and nature. He moves beyond the act of creating an image and focuses on the various aspects of man’s ambition to own and control nature through exaggerated actions of his subjects, shown in overstated methods of expression.

Park's serial photographic work that began in 2010 titled The Captured Nature goes beyond the meaning of simply capturing or collecting nature, holding a more aggressive connotation. He depicts various actions of people attempting to "capture or control nature" such as blowing air into plastic bags or smashing a rock with a hammer. The series of actions performed by the subjects in his work clearly illustrates the contradiction of humans obsessing and trying to conquer nature, a force that could never be conquered. In The Captured Nature_Snow #1 (2010), one of Park’s earlier works in the series included in this exhibit, shows subjects in a wide expansive snow field “capturing” the snow in a uniform manner. Also shown in this exhibit is The Captured Nature_Stone#3 (2011) which shows rocks covered with red stickers in a repetitive, compulsive, and moss-like fashion, as if to declare ownership while the subject shown, who seems to be responsible for the act, stands atop the rock in a conquering manner. Park’s work calls into question the effectiveness of such acts of seizure by man against nature, and states the underlining disparity of our reality. And just as unrealistic as the forms of these captures are, his work suggests metaphorically how the entire series of actions, and thus man’s desire to control nature, is intrinsically unreasonable. We come to realize that the contradictory situations illustrated in Park’s work, forced in situation and format, is in fact a projection of our own reality and society’s attempts to control nature. The exhibit will also include his newest addition to the series The Captured Nature_Earth (2012) where he focuses on how Koreans measure nature, especially land. The basic Korean unit for measuring and attributing value for land is by pyeong, or 3.3m² (approx. 1.8m x 1.8m). Based on this, Park sectioned off 4, 1, and 1/4 pyeong size lands respectively to exemplify various ways how nature can be quantified, declared ownership, and have this ownership transferred by humans. Another one of Park’s work The Captured Nature_Earth #9, held as part of an outdoor exhibition Nature (2012) at the Moran Art Museum, shows the numbers 1 through 9 formed using an equal amount of one pyeong of land. What these numbers represent is that much like their random sizes and values, the value placed on land by humans and the standards behind it are solely for the purposes of commercialization and more so for the sake of civilization, and not something that can be set in stone. In his work The Captured Nature_Tree (2012), the artist depicts the “capturing” process of a tree in accordance to a planned, arithmetic equation, calling forth similarities to uniform, tree-lined streets of the city and lined arrangements of flower beds.

Hyong-Ryol Bak’s capturing of nature photographs stem from long hours of hard labor, digging the earth, building up a mound, covering the ground with a gargantuan cloth, and so on. Instead of witnessing and capturing nature’s identity lost for the sake of humans, the artist offers unrealistic settings of the capture, and through the obviously visible disparity he makes a distinct contemplation about nature and suggests re-evaluating the relationship between nature and man.