MUG @ Photoville

Somehow it’s been almost a year since the last post here and, a year on, we’re back to Photoville. MUG Publishing again has two containers showing the work of several Korean photographers as well as a dozen or so publications. Jinhee Bae’s follow up to her What a Wonderful Day portraits is a lovely set of portraits that revisits her original subjects as their lives have continued onwards. Kim Gyosik’s photographic experiments are intricate and beautiful; I’ve been a fan of his work since I saw Pla-Wars at Trunk Gallery in 2009. Jaegu Kang’s (anti-)portraits of Korean soldiers are a stark reminder of the social machines within which individuals are made part of the whole as well as within which social bonds flourish between individuals.

The publications are simple and clean in their design and presentation of the photographs and explanatory texts–more reference catalogs than fetishistic photo-book objects.

Photoville itself is overwhelming in the amount of work being presented. It’s almost impossible to see anything given the weight and noise of the festival’s volume. Kim’s, Bae’s and Kang’s work stood out from much of the work in the festival.

“Seoul” and “Between or Border” @ Photoville

I should know better than to head to Photoville on a Sunday, but my friend Michael’s imprint was having a launch event for its fall releases so I swung by and took a swing through the containers. The crowds were thick and movement was slow.

Two containers caught my eye and are germane to this blog: “Seoul, the captial city of Korea” and “Between or Border”, both presented by Mug Publishing and curated by its founder Jin Hee Bae. (Mug had presented work at Photoville previously in 2016.) Eun-jong Lee‘s City SEOUL, Jung Hoon Lee’s Coming face to face…, Seokhoon Lee’s A Collapsed Tower, Bae’s What a Wonderful Day, Dongkeun Lee’s Flowing Alleys and Sperling Kim‘s Urinara were particularly engaging.

Several of the artists’ books were available, and I left with a small stack. Had I had more cash or Urinara not been sold out I’d have left with a few more. More thoughts to come when I’ve had time to spend with each of the books and process the work some.

Though not directly along this blog’s locus, I thought Judith Quax’s Voyage a Dakar, Ebifananyi’s The Photographers Trilogy and Smriti Keshari’s Just the Tip were interesting as well both for their photographs and presentations. HIPUganda’s 8 book set, of which Ebifananyi’s trilogy were a part, was the most engaging book at the Red Hook Press container.

Conversation about Asian American photographers at Aperture

Just saw this conversation from back in November on the Aperture blog. It’s well worth reading. Conversations like this are necessary right now.

One nitpick: the headline overstates the premise. My gut-response was reactionary: that there are well respected and well known, if not famous, Asian-American photographers. Not as many as there ought to be in the industry but certainly not none. A click-baity headline like this does a disservice, I think, to what is otherwise a thought provoking conversation. Matsuda notes that the work of the three photographers “make[s] visual space for nuanced dialogue”; the headline works against such a space.

Actually a second nitpick: why no links to the three photographers’ work (or did I miss them)?

Anyway, the conversation is good and the three photographers’ work is really good, too: Mary Kang, Tommy Kha, and Jessica Chou.

Happy New Year 2018

2017 was a little quiet here on the blog.

The plan for 2018 is to get back to weekly posts, but I’m going to move towards shorter posts that are more descriptive than critical. Hopefully this will help me balance keeping this blog current and actually keeping up with my commercial and creative work.

Ji and I were in Korea for most of December so I’ve got plenty of new books to get up on the blog, not to mention a stack from 2016 that haven’t made it up yet. Check back soon.

In the meantime, Happy New Year 2018!

Intermarriage and Contemporary Political Retrenchment

Oksun Kim’s Happy Together has been on my mind lately. And not because my wife and I aren’t smiling lately. We’re fine, thank you. It’s been on my mind because I’ve been thinking about the state of our interconnected world at large and the way its ripples affect peoples’ daily lives.

The photographs in Happy Together are portraits of mixed race couples set in domestic spaces. The Asian partner stares into the camera lens while the Western partner looks away. No one smiles. The most positive of the women betray the barest hint of satisfaction. There are male Asian partners only as part of a handful of gay couples and just one female Western partner in a lesbian couple.

Kim maintains the even keel of contemporary photography’s dispassionate, detached bathos. The subjects give little hint of what they are thinking. They seem posed, or more accurately forced. It cannot be that all intermarried couples so glum. I can’t help but wonder if a more humanistic documentary approach might not have better explored the questions and concerns Kim begins with regarding the challenges of intermarried couples in Korea.

Yael Ben-Zion’s Intermarried takes this more documentary approach and broadly explores similar ground that Kim has explored narrowly. Ben-Zion’s approach places a broader range of intermarried couples at the center of a web of interactions, artifacts and offspring. There is a wholeness to this approach and still a contemporaneous aspect in its archival research.

In Kim’s photographs, it is only the cracks in her posed facade that allow us to see who these people may be and the lives they lead: a bowl of ceramic fruit and pastries on a kitchen table; two horseshoe crabs swimming alone along a wall; the drudgery of a pile of laundry waiting to be folded; the blur of a child not frozen by the camera’s strobe; a meal waiting to be shared.

In both approaches there is a kind of underlying current of unease. Kim’s unease is evident in the question that leads to the work: “Are you happy.” And Ben-Zion’s unease is present in her tracing intermarriage through archives; she may be looking to the future but can’t help taking glimpses behind.

Ben-Zion’s subtle looks back over her shoulder don’t seem unreasonable. The world is undergoing a kind of retrenchment domestically (in many countries) and internationally. The depths and the degrees of these retrenchments are yet to be defined. For those who thought that we were on the cusp of a new tomorrow it might be time to re-examine assumptions (and redouble our efforts).

Kim’s photographs are a useful reminder that while “Are you happy?” may be a silly question to start with it is never silly to look at and to show an unvarnished (if perhaps less posed) look at what togetherness is. It is not the fairytale that wedding photographs suggest. There is inevitably complication and toil. This is true no matter who one’s partner is. And it is no less true for countries and alliances as it is for individuals and marriages. It is through partnerships that we find strength and support.

Happy Together
Kim, Oksun
2006
Support from the Arts Council Korea

Intermarriage
Yael Ben-Zion
2013
Kehrer Heidelberg Berlin

Jonathan Goodman reviews Sook Jin Jo’s recent cross photographs

Sook Jin Jo recently forwarded me this review of her latest nighttime photographs of neon crosses in Seoul. It’s a nice first look at Jo’s new work (though a bit winding).

For anyone passing will be in Seoul next month, be sure to check Jo’s cross photographs at the 2017 Seoul Photo Festival.

2017 Printed Matter NYABF

Jut got back from the New York Art Book Fair at MoMA/PS1. It’s day one and crowded already. I brought home bit of paper as you can see.

If you’re into art, books, art books, artists books, photography, photo books, design, zines, typography, posters, art history, social justice, naked people, free stuff, expensive stuff or anything else, you’ll probably find something to entertain and delight you at the fair.

I enjoyed chatting very briefly with AnticHam at the Red Fox Press table and seeing their new work. As always, wish I had money for their big books.

Zoe at the Datz Press table recognized me after having met me only briefly last year at their bookstore/cafe/darkroom/printing shop in Seoul. When I bought Minny Lee’s Encounters, she texted Minny to come back to the table to sign it! Minny told me all about her book and the work she’s making lately, then walked me over to the ICP/Bard table to show me her more informal artist book there, My Walden–which I also got a copy of and she signed, of course. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Barbara Bosworth, who also was hanging around the Datz Press table. Her Fireflies scroll(!) was cool as hell and beautifully boxed. As a design object, it really sums up what Datz Press is all about. I also got a copy of Gap Chul Lee’s Black Wind.

Anyone who’s in NYC ought to go check out the fair, though I would suppose anyone who’s reading this blog probably already has plans to…

Protest, Park Seung-hwa

My last visit to Seoul came at an interesting time. My own country had just elected an orange-hued charlatan (but much loved by some, apparently) to its highest office, sparking immediate protests. Seoul was in the midst of weekly and growing protests each Saturday against an expanding presidential scandal. And multiple elections were approaching in Europe with right-wing parties gaining ground in polls. There are many people marching in the streets lately who want to see change. With all of this as a background, I came across Park Seung-hwa’s Protest published by Listen to the City in The Book Society’s stacks.

At first blush Protest appears to be straight documentary photography of the protests wracking Korea in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They have all of the gritty hallmarks of documentary and journalistic photography. However, its narrative is diffuse. It begins in the middle, goes on relentlessly for 200 pages and ends without resolution.

The photographs run the gamut from dramatic confrontation to quiet determination. There are individuals acting alone and huge crowds of people acting in concert. We are shown moments of grace and moments of violence. On one page protesters look down from a rooftop at the police below. On the next page it is the police who are on the roofs looking down on the people below. The one constant is a sense of confrontation and anger, at turns explosive and subdued. The content of the photographs is mirrored by the divided compositions in contrasty and grainy yet richly rendered black and white.

Park draws from his own work as well as the work of the four other photographers who formed the National Photography Research Society (민족사진연구회). These five photographers, Kwon San-Ki, Park Seung-hwa, Song Hyeok, Lee Sohye, Lim Seok Hyun, came together photographing the protests. They gathered around an older photographer, Park Yong-su. Their efforts, specifically as culminated in the publication ofProtest, are a kind of extension of Park Yong-su’s 1989 book The Road of the People (민중의 길), in which he documented the events between the 1985 sit-in demonstration at the American Cultural Center in Seoul and Chun Doo-hwan’s going to Baekdamsa in 1988. Despite this added context, a straight documentary reading remains problematic.

Park’s introduction to Protest is helpful in reframing these photographs. He reveals that the contemporary making of the book, was an effort to “uncover [his] faded passion and shell of belief” represented by photographs made over two decades earlier. These photographs are personal. They project “a kind of political intention” and come from a “‘biased’ point of view.” The photographs are at once “records, commemorations and, in a way, propaganda.”

Park goes on:

Some people may not want to see them out of remorse and others may want to put the pieces of their memories put together[sic]. The fierce days of youth in the field of photography are forgotten now as they become sly oldies. Some of them have already lost their convictions. Even though they were politically pure in the beginning but now they are being misunderstood politically and contaminated non-politically. It was the time of immaturity and of glamour. It was, nevertheless, our past.

Protest then is a lament or reckoning rather than a dry documentation. It is a sober reconsideration of that time and where the flow of time has ultimately led. Despite having “walked so far away from the days of the photos…the day [Park] has dreamed of during those old days has yet to come.” He asks that the there be no mention of a “legendary saga” when reading these photos and notes that “the past [is] often glorified under the astute compromise.” We all, in order to live our lives in some measure of comfort, make compromises in our beliefs and actions; Park subtly suggests that if we are honest with ourselves, perhaps our compromises are really betrayals of our convictions.

In a similar vein, the book presents a kind of critique of photo-journalism and documentary photography. Park defines photographs as a “record of facts.” And yet he goes on to say that a myriad of photos can be created of a single scene. “These photos are all based on facts but far away from the truth.” Park does not claim to be publishing any kind of definitive view of these events. He goes so far as to call attention to the other photographers who were photographing these same events and whose photographs, if they could have been included in the book, would have made for “a finer and richer record.”

These photographs and Park’s view of their creation and value are appropriate to consider here in America in light of the protests happening in the present day. As may be self evident but certainly worth reiterating: protest in and of itself won’t bring about change. Those bodies in the streets lifting their voices may create the changes they seek or may simply gratify their desire to speak their piece. In order to effect change there must be concrete political action being taken before and after the marches, protests and demonstrations. Desiring change does not necessarily create change. It requires long years of hard work. It is equally likely that in thirty years we will look back and wonder where it all got them. Compromises for our own comfort will leave us “wandering around, or rather drifting away.”

싸움 Protest
Photographers: 민사연 (Kwon San-ki, Park Seung-hwa, Song Hyeok, Lee Sohye, Lim Seok Hyun)
Photo Editor: Park Seung-hwa
Introduction: Park Seung-hwa
Essay: Han Hong-gu
Publisher: Listen to the City
2016

Design Notes:
Protest is at once austere and lavish in its production. The cover is a matte black hardcover with paper wrapped boards; the title and publisher are embossed on its spine in white while the cover has only the years covered by the photographs, again embossed in white. This simple cover is wrapped in a asymmetrically folded dust jacket that folds out to a modestly sized poster with the cover imaging echoing outwards on the recto and an index of the book’s photographs on its verso. Within, the design gives structure for the images without calling undue attention to itself. The printing is richly done on a moderately heavy paper stock.