0. Caldera (Crater)

After multiple disastrous attempts at landing, a crash landing. The runway is completely burned out.

The color of the ground is pale. Soil that has lost its rigidity pours out like liquid. On this ruined land, the only cooperative force is erosion within the basin. The caldera was born to stage the ending of a planet. A cluster of water vapor drifts gently over a turquoise liquid. An announcement voice issued at the brink of suffocation: “This is a toxic substance. Stay away from the crater.”

The photographer has tonsils prone to suffocation. I asked her, Isn’t it dangerous?

She replies while her eyebrows fall off in clumps: “I was born here.”

That face looked like it belonged to someone who had just left that place.


 
0. Embracing Exclusion

The affect of the traveler lies in breaking faith with continuity. A stranger dropped into an unfamiliar city is startled to find that everything she brushes past has nothing to do with permanence. Encounters between traveler and site are temporarily bound; such unburdensome unions are loose and easily undone. The movement of the traveler is composed of countless repetitions and variations of provisional coupling and uncoupling.

Meanwhile, the practice of Yezoi Hwang—as both traveler and photographer—reveals the interior of the frame as a sealed chamber while simultaneously leaving what lies beyond the frame exactly where it is. In her work, inclusion and exclusion occur in a blunt, matter-of-fact manner. Within frames constructed from raw sensation and trust in her own propulsion, excluded elements are not discarded or deleted. Some are left deliberately unclear—an affection of the photographer, close to the traveler’s melancholy. Thus, Hwang’s act of photographing may be named ‘embracing exclusion’.

The journey begins with a small yet inevitable misreading: Hwang reads Safety as Sweety. Let us hypothesize one among the many possible circumstances that allowed such a linguistic mutation—this is, of course, fiction. It was no coincidence that she sensed danger upon seeing the word Safety.

Hwang is skilled at embracing exclusion, and perhaps at the very moment the word safety is uttered, it already contains its inverse—the world beneath safety, that is, danger. She soon recalls the allure of dangerous things: the temptation toward self-loathing, or a body prone to suffocation. Warnings of safety pass through danger before arriving at a sweet, tranquil conclusion. *Hating oneself is too sweet.*¹ Sweety. A word arriving with its body bent. Did the moment of misreading taste fishy?

Someone who would say that every day is a crash landing. A photographer who smells home in provisional things. In Yezoi Hwang’s photographs, eyes disappear. Among the thirty-two photographs, the one that captures passion most intensely is her self-portrait. Eyes and eyebrows vanish, and the surface left behind after erasure throbs with numbness. What we witness are the trajectories of light that grazed the skin and departed.

What she erased from her own face must surely have been beautiful, yet to assign sentimentality to absence and trace the footprints of beauty feels like a misunderstanding—and even a damaging—of photography’s capacity. There is only one way to look at her photographs: to face them directly, absorbing the dull shock that resonates upon encounter. Gazing at a scene where facial features have fled, one recalls the collision of that moment. Something inside me collapsed.

0. A Hole That Mediates Intrusion

In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Laura Mulvey exposes how the eroticism of the gaze codes femininity, and how cinematic illusion has long relied on representations of women. She writes: *“It has often been thought that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article.”*²

And now, here, a photographer preparing for separation. Through the destruction of what has been regarded as aesthetic, Yezoi Hwang lightly betrays conventional expectations and attempts a decisive break. The thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without denying it. The traveler advances—enduring the gravitational pull of home, erasing the urge to run back and embrace it, generating repulsive force with each step. It is a struggle. Everything you wish to see, I intend to turn into a weapon.

The erasure of facial features in Hwang’s photographs resembles the form of death. Figures appear as fragmented bodies, or as ghostly apparitions with cloth draped over their heads. Or as corpses packaged and awaiting transport. She plants apparitions throughout cities where she temporarily stays. Yet these memento mori materials do not merely embody sentimentality over absence or loss. Why are the faces in her portraits of women concealed, presented only as fragments or traces?

Let us recall once again the misreading at the journey’s outset—the gap between the two confused words. We may form a hypothesis, but the process remains eternally unknown. In the realm of perception, it is empty. Likewise, we may hypothesize forms upon the vanished face, but what we see is the space from which old desires have exited: a hole that is both entrance and exit.

The deprivation felt by the viewer intensifies upon encountering a stone split open, or the hollowed-out bust of a white man with its center emptied—this evokes the sensation of a hole. A hole may be understood as a gap mediating inside and outside, or as an expansion of space. Within visual pleasure as produced by images, femininity has been represented as radically deprived of space. Women’s images, especially, have been displayed flat against walls like pin-up girls, arousing sexual vitality. According to Mulvey, while objectified femininity functions flatly on screen, men—subjects of narrative—are internalized as super-egos possessing control over space. They transcend the screen’s limits and move actively.

Thus, the hole constructed by Hwang is a decision to restore the third dimension of space. Female sexual allure has long been described through metaphors such as black holes or vertigo.³ Yet the holes in Hwang’s photographs refuse to become either black holes that absorb everything or white holes that expel. What remains is a hole that only mediates intrusion—a wormhole, rather. A domain behind perception where only eternal hypotheses are possible, never interpretation or conquest. (Interstellar travel through wormholes is mathematically possible only.)


 
0. I Have the Right to Destroy Myself⁴

Vacuum and hyperventilation; the dead and the living; ascending jets of water and hands waiting to descend. The visual drop occurring between images is a breathing method devised by a photographer with sensitive tonsils. She probes balance among images that seek either erosion or overflow. Breathing through the aura that flows between colliding opposites, she comes to rescue us from suffocation—as the announcement voice issued at the brink of suffocation.

Are the recurring vivid reds—scarlet bloodstains or red lighting—symbols of a savior? Or merely reflections on the destruction she has committed, metaphorized through the intensity of red? Or perhaps they are warnings of the time we must endure together behind collapsed things.
Returning from provisional landscapes to the world of continuity, she now considers sustainable separation and solidarity within provisionality.

Though she approaches her subjects through immediate bodily sensation, the scenes that appear accidentally acquired are in fact languages of the body that Hwang has persistently explored and accumulated. She seems as if she has once inhabited another’s body, so well does she understand the grip with which one holds another. Lives overflowing and dissolving in her arms. While respecting the right to self-destruction, she resolves never to let them die alone. Yezoi Hwang embraces apparitions. Ave Maria. Ave Maria.


 
¹ Borrowed from lyrics of the song Dala by musician Kim Sawol.
² Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, trans. Nanji Yoon.
³ In Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (1958), the female protagonist Judy is represented as both voyeuristic object and fetishistic allure for the male protagonist Scottie.
⁴ A sentence from correspondence with Yezoi Hwang, originally by Françoise Sagan. In the letter, Hwang adds: “Trying to suppress the desire not to live, ink once again stained my body.”

References

• [비평] 망령이 된 얼굴들 : 황예지의 사진과 충돌하는 감각에 대한 몸의 기록
  [Critique] Faces Turned into Apparitions: A Bodily Record of Colliding Sensations in Yezoi Hwang’s Photography