Across from You, 2024

Hyunjoo Chung

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 Through the only passage, I enter a separate space. Here, I finally encounter the owner of the gaze, whom I might have assumed existed somewhere within the subject. Whether capturing a fleeting reflection on the water or hiding behind the model in a mirror, she now appears to be exploring a point in space and time by visualizing herself in front of a mirror. In the photograph, “the subject could not be clearer, and the gaze is fixed without wavering.”

I am confronted with the essential act of capturing someone, and in the face of that action, I realize that I have become the object. The gesture of taking a photograph reveals how the artist’s choices will project into the future. Alongside the two interlocking situations of you looking at her and her looking at you through the camera, the mirror in the background dizzyingly reflects the presence of the object corresponding to the camera, resembling countless emerging masks. Having viewed the objects in sync with the artist’s gaze, safely positioned somewhere, you can no longer escape her watchful eye. You are ensnared in this dazzling web of acrylic mirrors and faces that gaze and are gazed upon.

 

 However, within the context of the entire space objectified by the person with the camera, I observe myself again as part of the formalizing frame. The viewer, aware of the reflective distance, confronts the situation, taking on the role of observing themselves while pursuing the formalization of what has been observed. Moreover, observation changes the situation being observed. The viewer, who becomes part of the frame, enters, manipulates, and photographs the given context. In engaging with this situation, the artist’s intended angle deviates, and the goal the artist sought is disrupted. In this moment, the image in the mirror—a product of gazing at the world—becomes something new that merges with the transformed world of the viewer. The return of being lies with the viewer.

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Excerpt from A Gaze upon Seulki Ki’s Gaze

-Geist (ghosts) in the Exhibition, the Viewer, and the Return of Being

Installation view 

Across from you, 2024, UV print on acrylic mirror, 119 x 239cm(7ea)