Photo tells tales

By Kwon Mee-yoo

• Published Oct 23, 2014 5:25 PM KST
• Updated Oct 23, 2014 5:25 PM KST

Insight into human nature behind whimsical photos

This is the fourth in a series of interviews with notable artists recommended by the Korean Artist Project, an online platform promoting Korean art. — ED.

By Kwon Mee-yoo

A man swims in a sea within his room. A girl stands next to her pink bed, but her room has been filled with overgrown plants. Monkeys and trees have invaded a construction site of an apartment.

These photos seem fancy and whimsical with eccentric points. However, when examined closely, there is a sense of foreignness — everything is out of traditional perspective and the world is distorted. But the photos maintain an aesthetic beauty and tell a story at the same time. The viewers have no choice but to appraise the photo to find the narrative in it.

These are photographic collages of artist Won Seoung-won — also stylized as Won Seoung Won — who blends reality and fantasy in a delicate, elaborate way.

Large prints of Won’s photos and posters for exhibitions hang on the wall of her atelier in Yangju, Gyeonggi Province. Right above her desktop computer is “Dreamroom — Seoungwon,” a composite photo of herself in her dorm transformed into a tropical forest. The “Dreamroom” series took inspiration from her days studying abroad. Though she lived in a tiny dorm which was packed with a bed, a desk and a sink, her imagination blended her utopia into the small room. Now the artist edits and composes photos under her idea of dreams, forging an eccentric world of hers.

Won majored sculpture at Chung-Ang University and went to Germany to study further. However, she faced physical challenges in dealing with heavy materials and large-scale installations while attending the Kunstakademie Duesseldorf.

“That was the first time when I seriously considered why I wanted to become an artist. I drew well since childhood, so I had no doubt that I will follow art as my profession. But I had to think again about my life and art,” Won said.

An unexpected breakthrough came when she decided to take a photo of every object in her room. “The dorm I lived had an area of eight square meters. It was too small and I could only keep the most necessary things in the room. I flopped on my knees at one side of my room and took photos of everything I could get my hands on — gold ring, moldy kebab, undergarments and unwashed socks. Some of them were embarrassing, but I made a rule not to exclude anything for any reason. The 628 objects in my room revealed me so frankly even without my face. Then I realized art is not bluffing, but building fantasy based on truth,” the 42-year-old artist recalled.

This is became the installation “My Life,” now owned by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in Calif., also opened the door of photography to Won. “I didn’t have to physically bring every heavy object to work with. Instead, I could take photos of them and create an installation within my computer,” she said.

Photographic utopia

Since then, Won’s works are all rooted from her experience and inspired by her family and friends.

“Dreamroom” series, ran from 2000 to 2004, was initiated from stress over housing while studying in Germany where many of the artist and her friends lived in small dorms.

“I wanted to transform my friends’ and my itty-bitty rooms into some place nice — the place of their dreams. So I took photos of their rooms and made them into rooms of fantasy,” Won said. “This is somewhere between the real room and the ideal world. The owner of the room doing something in it blurs the boundary and blends the two disparate worlds.”

Many contemporary artists take on social issues as theme of their works, but Won chose to focus on individual issues. “I have a microscopic view, but I believe that I best can tell the stories of people around me. Sometimes, it leads me to bigger issues.”

For instance, her 2008 work “Tomorrow — Village of Dogs” originated from her father’s farm, where dogs were often abandoned. “He kept the first abandoned dog and brought in another. It soon snowballed and he had to do part time job to feed the dogs. I became interested in the issue of abandoned dogs and created a village of dogs,” the artist said.

“My Age of Seven” series was Won’s way to face her childhood trauma and heal it through art. The tale begins from a girl’s room transformed into a forest and continues through a small town with big trees and a stream.

“My mother found employment when I was seven and I suffered separation anxiety, though I did not realize what was happening to me then,” Won said. “So I made a tale of a seven-year-old girl looking for her mother who went missing.”

Her 2013 “Character Episode I” series shifts focus to more evil side of human nature such as greed and obsession.

“Human relations are the most interesting and the most difficult thing in my life. The ‘Character Episode’ series deals with negative sides of five people around me and I had to substitute them with animals to secure anonymity.”

“The Ark of Obsession” refers to the obsession toward house, while “The Star Apartment of the Eldest Son” is a metaphor to the eldest son who is considered responsible for the family.

Most of her photographic collages have layers of some 300 to 500 photos. It is labor-intensive and time-consuming as Won takes photos of the objects by herself and erase the background manually to get the image she desire.

“Some people may think my works are digital, but I think it leans more to analogue. Computer and Photoshop is just the tool I use,” she said. “It takes a long time, but these forced, refined moments make me communicate with each object.”

Won mostly uses natural objects as symbols and it takes a full two-year cycle for Won to complete a series of photos as she needs photos from all four seasons.

“First I make a rough sketch of the photo and organize what photos I need and what season to take them. As the weather and other conditions are beyond my control, I take preliminary photos in the first year and go out again the next year, learning through trial and error,” the artist explained.

“I am waiting for an overcast sky to go on for photo trip,” Won said. As she places layers of photos on top of other photos, each photo has to be neutral instead of being too intense. Photos taken on sunny days are rather strong in light and shade, so Won prefers a cloudy day than a clear day.

Won’s next project is about office workers. “As an artist who mostly works alone, I always was curious about office life — why people have Monday sickness and how the workplace influences them. I am interviewing and researching publishers, IT companies, museums and galleries to find out more about each group,” she said.

“It is boring to draw happiness as happiness. I want to interpret the image in the counter direction and it makes the viewers infer a wider perspective from the original. I think the artist’s role is to make the people to think about something and lead them to find a solution through an artistic riddle,” she said.

For more information about the artist, visit www.koreanartistproject.com.