Since
the early 1990s, when the era of digital photography began to blossom, Korean
photography has undergone rapid changes throughout the 2000s in its modes of
production, editing, distribution, creation, and exhibition. At a time when
theoretical approaches and academic discourse on contemporary Korean
photography were still insufficient, Kang Hong-Goo’s photographic experiments
provided crucial points of departure for reflecting on the characteristics of
the photographic medium and the new possibilities of digital photography.
His
attempt to dismantle the formal aesthetics long upheld by the photographic
field—namely the dichotomies of “pure/non-pure” or “straight/made”—and to
expand photography as image, along with his imagination and practice rooted in
subculture (popular culture, or what Kang himself has defined as the position
of a B-grade artist), opened up a new phase of realistic (documentary)
photography that approaches truth.
Even
within a rapidly changing media environment, Kang Hong-Goo demonstrated
vitality in developing new photographic languages and creative compositions,
generating a joyful kairos. As a first-generation digital photographer, he
symbolically and persuasively presents the realities of Korean society through
diverse photographic techniques and transformations. His so-called Kang
Hong-Goo–style allegorical montages—connecting and reconstructing frames
divided through Photoshop, applying or letting paint drip onto photographs,
drawing objects that were not photographed, or producing images whose status as
photography or painting (taken or drawn) cannot be clearly determined—have been
continuously produced, creating reverberations within the photographic field.
Kang
Hong-Goo’s artistic practice can be broadly divided into five periods by year.
From 1992, when he first purchased a computer, to 1998, before digital cameras
came into widespread use, he conducted a wide range of media experiments.
During this period, he primarily employed photomontage and photocollage
techniques, producing images by scanning and compositing photographs from
magazines or commercial postcards, or by photographing with a film camera,
printing the images, and reconstructing them through a scanner. He also used a
“hand-held scanner” to secure digital data.Major works from this period
include Self-Portrait (1992), Who Am
I (1998), and Fugitive (1996),
which pursue the identity of the artist/individual through constant
self-surveillance and doubt regarding one’s position as both an artistic
creator and an everyday person.
In Happy
Our Home (1997), Kang examines the realities of the family by
portraying unhappiness and exposing contradictions within the family system and
domestic life. The series War Phobia (1998)
vividly reveals the artist’s latent fear—an anxiety naturally internalized
after the Korean War. These early works were brought together in his second
solo exhibition, 《Position · Snob
· Fake》(Kumho Museum of Art, 1999). In this exhibition,
Kang Hong-Goo formally declared himself a “B-grade artist,” drawing public
attention.
The
second period begins after 1998, when Kang started using digital cameras and
produced his distinctive digital landscape series. Formally, this period is
divided into black-and-white panoramas and color panoramas. The black-and-white
panoramic series includes Greenbelt(1999–2000), Hangang
Public Park(2001), Sea(2002), Busan(2002), Drama
Set(2002), and Fish with Landscape(2002).
These works depict ordinary landscapes encountered during Kang’s walks, yet
they unfold uncanny scenes of subtle dissonance and distortion characteristic
of our time.
The
photographs of the greenbelt—development-restricted zones on the outskirts of
Seoul—are irony itself. As Kang himself has noted, the greenbelt in his
photographs is by no means “green.” Under the fervor of development, traces of
disorder, pollution, decay, and deterioration are hidden within the
black-and-white images.
Hangang Public Park, Sea,
and Busan share a certain affinity in both content
and form, resembling scenes from a Hong Sang-soo–style film that seem to unfold
in real life. Sudden, unexpected, and bizarre elements appear openly and
without disguise. In Fish with Landscape, an
unfamiliar, alien-like other roams freely as if it were in its natural habitat. The sudden appearance of a fish transforms the photograph into a dream, a film,
or a fantasy. This series subsequently leads to object-based photographic works
such as Mickey’s House and Trainee.
Drama
Set reflects on the nature of floating images—images that are
loosely set up, manipulated, and endlessly replicated in order to be seen—by
using actual filming sets. If an image is something that appears real despite
lacking substance, Drama Set is a meticulously
staged work that reveals the ephemerality of images.
