Poster image of 《Last nights》 © O’NewWall

Space O’NewWall presents Hong Jin-hwon’s solo exhibition 《Last nights》.

Defining himself as a landscape photographer, Hong addressed in his first solo exhibition 《Temporary Landscapes》 the devastation of ecological environments brought about by urban development under compressed modernization and by indiscriminate civil engineering and construction projects disguised as economic growth, as well as urban redevelopment carried out while uprooting the human conditions of social life.

His second solo exhibition, 《Crimson, Green》, documented landscapes spanning Jeju, Okinawa, Miryang, and Fukushima, investigating through the green beings inhabiting these four sites how these disparate landscapes are connected.

What he discovered were surviving entities in which history itself had sedimented: sites where traces and memories of the inhumanity produced by humans had fed on crimson blood and grown into a green history that remained rooted in place.


Hong Jin-hwon, Last nights #49 Gyeongbu Expressway, Chupungnyeong Service Area, 2014, Digital pigment print, 41.3 x 55 cm © Hong Jin-hwon

In an Age Addicted to Speed: The Unvarnished Landscapes of Korea’s 210 Expressway Service Areas

This third solo exhibition, 《Last nights》, turns to the service areas along the expressways that form the arteries of Korea’s modernization. The project began with the artist’s fascination with what he calls the “irresponsible disorder” permitted at expressway service areas, but as he continued photographing service areas across the country, he found himself confronted with a growing number of questions.

True to the name “expressway,” everyone accelerates, while service areas, legally required at intervals of every 25 kilometers, reveal different faces by day and by night. Although Hong regards the service area as a gap within the expressway—a symbol of social speed—and an officially sanctioned point of departure from its trajectory, we scarcely know what rest means.

In a situation where no one can predict the pace of their own life, the service area has ceased to be a place to stop and rest and has instead become somewhere strangely unfamiliar.

According to the artist’s research, following the opening of the Gyeongbu Expressway in 1970 as a symbol of the nation’s modernization, South Korea had 37 expressways in operation as of 2015, along with 210 service areas beginning with Chupungnyeong Service Area. Hong Jin-hwon traveled to every expressway service area marked on the map and observed their landscapes.

The photographic method he adopted in this process focused on fragments of the service areas after sunset. As the lights of the service areas begin to go out one by one, people disappear, revealing their unadorned faces. He traveled across the country and prepared the present exhibition. The photographs remained, and those photographs are now presented in the exhibition before us.

Yet after completing this seemingly futile journey, he chose the title 《Last nights》. The service-area landscapes he observed over the course of a year came to impose another task upon him during that same period.

Rooted in a branch of documentary photography, Hong’s practice has difficulty distancing itself from the circumstances of our lives that do occur but should never have occurred. He cannot turn away from the exceptional events produced by the speed of our lives, epitomized by the Sewol ferry disaster of April 2014.

After realizing the impotence of philosopher Paul Virilio’s declaration that “to stop is to die,” even when confronted with its opposite consequence, the expressway service areas Hong traveled through became breathless, nauseating spaces.

Amid their dizzying symbols and incomprehensible lights, he saw isolated islands where rest had been deferred and which had been shipwrecked by the force of speed. Islands exposed to drifting debris and to lights that had nothing to do with them seemed to float there. In those places, he found himself confronting a situation in which he, too, became an island.


Hong Jin-hwon, Last nights #01 Seohaean Expressway, Gunsan Service Area, 2015, Digital pigment print, 41.3 x 55 cm © Hong Jin-hwon

Records of the “Last Nights” Sending Distress Signals

Hong Jin-hwon recalls that after traveling across the country and returning to where he had started, he found that there was no longer any place for him to return to.

A passage from a book by literary critic Hwang Hyun-san, whom he encountered in the course of this journey, became a point of departure for thinking about this exhibition: “It was not because the many students in front of Gyeongmudae did not know what they were doing that they were shot to death, nor was it because the young people of Gwangju, surrounded by overwhelming violence, underestimated the world that they tried to hold the Provincial Government Building on that final night.”

The exhibition 《Last nights》 is a testament to the distress signals the artist witnessed. It contains a confession that he could do nothing but record and reflect on not one final night, but those nights that return persistently. The exhibition is precisely this present condition in which he questions the landscapes themselves and also questions himself for having pursued them.

Even if he says, “In any case, I tried to take a roundabout way and ended up sinking into a quagmire,” and considers these photographs records of that futile drifting, distress signals are ultimately signals that have been found. They may have been found too late, and that belatedness may be hollow for those who sent them, but the temporal distance between us and the temporal distance carried by photographs cannot simply be contained within the artist’s sense of futility and self-reflection.

《Last nights》, conveying the distress signals of modernization, addresses the landscapes of our lives suggested by the landscapes of the expressway. One may choose to grasp only a single tributary of these narratives, or confront through the exhibition the ways in which today’s speed suspends life and produces estrangement.

Just as 《Last nights》 takes a plural form in its title, we have a history of nights that persistently return, and here stands someone who records and bears witness to those nights.

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