James Casebere was born in 1953, in East Lansing, Michigan. He went to Michigan State University, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from which he graduated in 1976 with a B.F.A. And in 1980, he joined in a new movement of photography by participating at “Painting Generation”, an exhibition organized within other post modern photographers, such as Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Richard Prince, and Barbara Kruger.

James Casebere has participated in many exhibitions at remarkable galleries and art museums in Europe, and also in Biennales: Whitney Biennale in 1985 and Venice in 1996. In the year 2000, he held several grand solo exhibitions and stood as one of the most recognized artist in America. His works were collected by museums worldwide: such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Tate Gallery and many others. In 1999, he was nominated at one of the important prize in photography, the Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize, and received John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Grant in 1995.

Nowadays it is indispensable to talk about contemporary art without photography. Recently it is getting valuated as another influence of media, beyond which we knew before 1970s as only a result of a machine that reproduced the reality, also known as the straight photography. Today applying this method is more than just showing as it is, but a way to enthusiastically express one’s purpose and show the “new reality” derived from the original. We could include James Casebere here among Richard Prince, Laurie Simmons, Sandy Skoglund, and Vik Muniz as representative artists of American contemporary art.

For the last thirty years, James Casebere has continuously constructed complex models and photographed them by the photographic process of Ciba-chrome; which is adapted in his massive size of photographs. His table-sized models are made of simple materials, which are concreted with essential forms. Not only simple but also evoking the viewers with the powerful atmosphere, his works are focused on photography, architecture and sculpture.

Since the late 1990s, he made images whose sources span the globe starting with the bunker under the Reichstag (Flooded Hallway), and the sewers in Berlin (Two Tunnels). He created an expansive and beautiful body of work referencing the Atlantic slave trade. This includes a slave factory in West Africa, (Four Flooded Arches), plantations in the West Indies (Nevision Underground), Thomas Jefferson’s plantation home in Virginia (Monticello), and other 18th Century American colonial architecture.
The modern architects Victor Horta (Spiral Staircase, and Turning Hallway) and Richard Neutra (Garage, and Dorm Room) inspired him to create another small austere group of works that seem to cast a critical eye on the homogenizing effects of globalization.

Recently, Casebere turned his attention toward Spain and the Eastern Mediterranean. Several works examine 10th century Andalusia and the flowering of culture and co-operation between Islamic, Jewish and Christian cultures before the Inquisition. (La Alberca, Abadia, Spanish Bath, Mahgreb.) Other images depict Tripoli, Lebanon, Nineveh, and Samara in Iraq, and Luxor, Egypt. Several photographs of elaborate soaring models of mosques were inspired by the 16th century Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan.

As so on, the continuous research of architectural settings of the artist, compounds new images which naturally reflect the historical scene of the cultural current. This first solo exhibition held in Korea, would provide the opportunity to experience the valuable series of the ‘tunnels and deserted interiors’, ‘flooded arches’ and the recent series of ‘Levant’.