Like most images today, in which recording and storage have shifted to digital devices and are further transmitted and circulated through digital screens and platforms, AN Chorong’s photographs also begin from data. However, the artist’s work does not aim to critically reflect on the properties of digitized images.

She simply and habitually takes photographs of her surroundings without end, transfers them to a hard disk, classifies them into loose lists, and stores them as data.1) What is interesting here is that his data, which actively relies on the mechanism of infinite replication and reproduction, always seems to desire to be interpreted and expanded into new contexts as a kind of potential state.

In other words, rather than treating images as her own personal commemorations of a specific time and place, one could say that the recorded images themselves seem to contain a certain “desire” and are expected to actively interact with external contexts or with others. This allows her work to be considered in terms of the agency of images proposed by W. J. T. Mitchell.2)

That is, the images produced by AN Chorong are not repositories of fixed meaning, but dynamic and living phenomena that are reconstructed broadly through history, society, and culture, and more narrowly through individual experiences and memories.

In fact, rather than asking viewers to passively access the moments in which she existed and recorded, the artist stimulates individual memories, experiences, and emotions, while expecting a shared psychological response.3)

AN Chorong’s photographs are transformed into a more active language of response through sculptural concreteness. On the opposite side of the flat and smooth surface of digital images, and of images treated as the language of skins and shells within consumer culture, she adopts a strategy of materialized images.

Since photographic art presupposes printing from the outset, this realm of materiality may not seem particularly new, yet the artist refers to and appropriates the support of the image across various dimensions and contexts. At times, by exhibiting together the image of a postcard sent by a friend and an old photograph she took of that friend’s everyday life, she reflects on the present built upon a nonlinear past that has deviated from linear time, as in 《Night Turns to Day》(Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2019).

At other times, she appropriates a mobile phone case as a frame for photography and considers the way her photographs dwell within another person’s everyday life, as in 《AN CHORONG PLUS》(Dapalm, Seoul, 2023). The photograph that becomes one with a mobile phone accessory even moves beyond the way photography exists in everyday life, causing images to form a chain as “a photograph inserted into a case within a photograph taken together with a selfie.”

In doing so, it prompts us to reconsider the ontological status of images that originate from the act of “taking photographs,” which has become a universal cultural practice. It recalls contemporary reality under the proposition of the democratization of images, in which images once exclusively produced and controlled by a minority can now be photographed, edited, disseminated, and circulated by anyone.

It also brings to mind the reorganization of social, cultural, and political hierarchies surrounding images, as well as an order in which diverse voices and experiences coexist. AN Chorong’s photographic attitude of bringing images into the realm of matter by relying on supports continues in 《Flesh》(Primary Practice, Seoul, 2025).

Through photographs placed and inserted into a structure that looks like a four-person table laid on its side, the artist at first glance recalls the way photographic images exist when slipped between the tabletop and glass of a dining table in everyday life. This leads the viewer’s gaze toward a more private dimension in relation to the properties of photography—that is, the attitude of reminiscing about and remembering specific memories and experiences from the past.

The mode of existence of photography, taken from private habits and behaviors, continues in photographs rolled up and placed inside transparent glass cups, as in New Home(2024). Rather than foregrounding the interpretive meaning or aesthetic achievement of the image itself, these works seem to evoke the intimate forms of our lives through the material conditions in which the images exist, and to ask again about the relationship between photographic images and everyday life.

If the attempt to add “flesh” to photographic images lies in settling data-images, through the process of printing, onto various kinds of solid frames and awakening shared everyday sensations by relying on medium-specific characteristics, then the temporal sensation that arises between individual images and between arranged images, along with their narrative potential, may be considered another kind of “flesh.”

The photographs encountered in the exhibition depict the artist’s family, very close acquaintances, objects, and landscapes. What is interesting here is the principle of image composition that AN Chorong adopts. Rather than picking up the camera to capture decisive moments, she indulges in “scenes” of everyday life that he encounters by chance, but that are above all natural.

She avoids assigning excessive meaning or symbolism to individual subjects, and instead turns her attention to the situation in which they are placed, or to the way objects exist in everyday spaces, as though tracing the mode of existence of a particular individual within the order of things. In her photographs, figures are boldly cropped, and in the scenes she captures, the background draws the gaze almost equally with the objects placed at the center.

Most subjects are not signs meant to prove a special relationship with the artist, but instead share only the emotions that pass through their distinctive abstract situations. They are clearly “records” of everyday life, but their descriptive message or narrative as documentary photographs is ambiguous.

Although they clearly appear to be direct and concrete scenes from the lives surrounding the artist, individual subjects lose their concreteness in photographs that do not identify with the subject through emotional projection, but maintain the gaze of an observer with a distinctive sense of distance.

In this way, the wrinkles and visible veins of an elderly woman are translated into the maximized materiality of skin, as in Apricot and Woman(2020), Visiting Hours(2024), and Happy Birthday(2024), while the image of hands massaging an elderly person’s feet and legs in Massage(2020) leads to a heterogeneous material sensation arising from the contact between two bodies that contain time differently.

Meanwhile, personal beliefs, wishes, desires, compulsions, or tastes that can be inferred from images partially extracted from the objects composing someone’s space deviate from their original systems of sign and symbol, and are reduced to the image of the object itself, as in Old House #1(2017), Old House #2(2021), Old House #3(2024), and Wet Money on the Bed(2021).

In addition, scenes in which only parts of the body remain—such as the posture of cutting and sharing food at a table, or hands moving busily in the background of objects—secure a space that can boldly invite some kind of narrative outside the frame, transforming into gestures that serve countless narratives others may project onto them.

Through this somewhat loose principle of relation and composition, which resists being classified into fixed types, the artist’s photographs move away from personal recollection or private sentiment, and instead rapidly close the distance with viewers by demanding psychological, emotional, and narrative responses.

The numbers attached to the titles of the works suggest the time of shooting, proving that these images began as recorded data, and that they acquire the rhythm of life through recontextualization and rearrangement. In this way, in AN Chorong’s photographs and their hierarchy-free scenes, symbols are dismantled, and images are secularized, beginning to live with emotions that are closer than anything to life.

The white cube, often referred to as the norm of the exhibition space, built its structure on the sacredness of religion and the solemn objectivity of the courtroom. Today, however, when anyone can easily produce images with the camera in their hand and “exhibit” the photographs they have taken through digital platforms, the authority to grant sacredness once held in the hands of the photographer appears to be slowly stripped away.

Having lost its ritual value, photography has become a weightless and light image spread everywhere. Yet AN Chorong actively accepts and appropriates the secularity of contemporary images. As a photographer, before imposing a grand meaning onto the subject, she listens for the moment when the subject speaks for itself in the encounter between photography and the object.

For example, just as a painter may face a blank canvas and imagine a space or scene of infinite depth, she seems to believe that a photographer has a moment of “accepting” or “quoting” the world at the scale of the frame. For the moment when the subject speaks for itself, AN Chorong adds flesh to the thin surface of the image, or draws out the thick flesh lying beneath the skin.

In doing so, the images he draws up from piles of data are transformed from potential states for new contextual interpretation into images of everyday life and living. Within them, intimate emotions such as love, hatred, regret, and memory collide, and the flesh added to data-images that remain only for a moment grants these fleeting secular images an affective instant that feels almost eternal.


1. Many of the photographs the artist has taken and posted on her website are usually classified by “place names.” Some are even contained in a folder named “null.” Looking at the photographs within each category, they are far from commemorative photographs that reveal the characteristics of those places. There, mute images whose time and place are ambiguous seem merely to float, classified according to the artist’s convenience.
2. W. J. T. Mitchell reinterprets the image not simply as a sign or a means of transmitting information, but as an agent. This is a perspective that sees the image as containing a certain “desire” of its own, and that this desire interacts with viewers or with social contexts.
3. For example, in 《Transposition》(Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2021), AN Chorong used parts of advertising images that are rapidly consumed and discarded, encouraging critical thought about the process through which images of contemporary popular culture are internalized into our perception. In 《Fem》(d/p, Seoul, 2022), she spoke about “femininity” by focusing on what the women in the photographs see and what AN Chorong sees as a woman photographer, selecting images against the background of the “female gaze” in everyday life.

References

• 《Flesh》