Since 1839, when the French Academy of Sciences announced the invention of the camera, photography has evolved tremendously into an independent art genre, beyond its technology, occupying a more critical position in contemporary art than any other medium. Irrespective of genre and major, many Korean artists have developed their art worlds using this medium, producing work based on the contemplation on images, and engaging problems of representation and meaning and the condition of photography. Some present images of fictitious situations twisting or shattering the fact photographs can be evidence, records, or clear representations of objectivity. Photographs also question problems of the gaze, representation, and artist as subject, reflecting on established photographic viewpoints while aggressively embracing photography as a pictorial tool. Zu’s work is one of such examples.
The photographic surface is two-dimensional, and photographic paper is a flat surface and skin. A photograph is an image on a flat surface made with light. Photography and painting represent the three-dimensional on a two-dimensional surface. The two can present illusory images on skin, or reproduce three-dimensional objects and worlds on a plane. In this sense, whatever the imagery, paintings and photographs engage our perception and reality. An aspect of the reality perceived like this creates illusory experience, recalling an external environment in three dimensions.
This is photography’s mysterious power. Recent photographic work by many artists question boundaries between reality and illusion, and the medium itself, beyond its function of recording and visualizing concepts. It also questions photographic perception derived from a process of encapsulating a concrete world and setting it on a plane. Zu’s work also lies in this context. For Zu, photography works as the material of painting. He creates images with photographs replacing paint and brush. His photo collage is made by a painter’s eye and hand.
According to the visual comparisons of Karl Pfenninger, German physiologist, we perceive two-dimensional images with one eye alone – either right or left, and spatial vision is created by the differences in each creatively combined by the brain. Creating hybrids, our eyes engender creative combinations and illusions, attributes used in Zu’s photography. Refusing ‘one-eye viewing’, Zu attempts a multi-dimensional approach. He uses photographs of diverse scenes to gain ‘an effect like the real’, trying to show the ideal world we perceive. He diversifies a present visual point, and time, breaking away from perspective.
Zu’s photographs present the world in a two-dimensional circle. He gets many photographic images through a 360-degree revolution of the camera, and combines and composes them into one photo. His photographs look like a distortion of the real. He unfolds a strange world distant from the reality he began with. However, his photographs make us realize that his multi-faceted imagery is a realistic appearance of reality.
He photographs familiar urban scenes which have little significance, but the position the subject views them from is confusing. In his work the subject does not see the world: to the contrary, the object or the world sees the subject, taking photographs. His photographs implicitly incapacitate the artist’s subjective position of controlling a work and dominating the world.
Zu’s photographs have representation constructing a scene, centering on an imaginary vanishing point, deviating from Western visual representation. Perspective is the principle of representing three-dimensional real space on a two-dimensional surface, according to an object’s distance and size, based on mathematical principles, a critical issue in modern art. Perspective is the principle of representation, generating illusion, so one feels and sees the real while viewing represented objects.
Photography is also seen as an objective representation of the external world. A photo is thus considered the same as the real object, the result of its certification, and a clear objective record. However, a photograph is a demonstration of an aspect of the world before our eyes, reflecting an observer’s viewpoint, stance, and concern without filtering. In this sense strictly accurate, objective photographs and purely representational photographs are actually impossible. Photography is not composed of a pure system of representation that is sole and completed in itself. Any representation is in fact impossible. Photography is not confined to the function of representation alone. It is also one of many mediums addressing images. Zu’s photographs do not reveal the objective world clearly and vividly, but intentionally raise a question about representation’s transparency.
As is widely known, determining the meaning of images in postmodern art is not done through a referential object in the external world but through the relationship between images, that is, meaning as the text. The images thus do not inform, represent or describe the world. They create the world anew. The real strength of images is in this creative work. The real cannot be captured by these images, and a direct representation is impossible.
Zu combines and puts together the views from a 360-degree revolution, making space into a plane. In his photographs we can see a three-dimensional object in the same time. These photographs shorten or integrate time to look around objects. These present the world that is surely visible but we could not see, and scenes concealed or oppressed. With them we re-recognize the world we see and doubt photographic representation. The world is not standstill in a fixed time. Dominated by time, it is continuously fluctuating, circling, and proceeding forward swiftly. Putting together diverse times and scenes, Zu uncovers established photographic perspectives that are distorted, and denotes his photographs that look like fictions and fantasies yet show the real aspects of the world. His elaborate photographs deconstruct photographic viewpoints and remove their fixed ideas, maintaining visual pleasure based on solid formative elements and principles.
Zu’s photographs are taken with his whole body. This means he does not see the world with one eye. Seeing is an act of the whole body. Seeing is done with the body. ‘Seeing’ (voir) is knowing (savoir). In other words, seeing something is knowing in the entire body. This is a sort of accepting. Seeing is not a passive act but actively embracing something. It shows my body’s perceptual response to an object. The object I see is neither fixed nor completed. It remains variable and ambiguous as a discontinuous being floating under the control of time. The truth of the true nature of a specific object is also under the control of time. If so, it can be said that the true nature or original look of an object is absent. As a result, a belief that we can represent and depict objects accurately is denied.
Photography represents the external world, but in fact captures some specific time through which the world continuously changes. While looking at photographs, we recall and identify with the world, but actually these are nothing but fragments of a specific moment in time. Likewise, all that exists changes under the control of time. Time is therefore the vertigo shattering the systematic world of representation, and an enormous swirling force destroying the idol of the original.
As time is not a substance we know through intuition, there is no ‘moment’ and ‘eternity’. If time has substance, this time generates some difference. Zu’s photographs showing the world where scenes are captured in diverse times are combined or divided, and continued in circle to reveal such difference. We become skeptical about things we see due to this difference and division. This skepticism shatters all familiarity. An act of art is not different from doubting the universal visual convention of the times, seeing strangely, disturbing the senses, and shattering familiarity.
By Park Yong-taik, Art Critic & Kyonggi University Professor
