"I wanted to make fake photographs that are extremely meaningless because I was really irritated by words and theories surrounding art. I wished my photographs to be meaningless, empty, and completely nonsensical."- Kang Hong-Goo, "Drama set/Fragment/Disguise"
 
All artists wish to get out of art history and the art system and make something new that is not tied to existing customs. Practically all possibilities may have been explored by their predecessors, however, and at this point when the end of art history is being debated, attempts to make a change may seem meaningless. However desperately one tries, it is difficult to get out of a system that has already been solidified, and any effort to make a difference usually falls into the evil cycle of reinforcing that very system.

Nevertheless, artists keep trying because the world they live in, constantly changing through advancements in science and technology and with evolutions of society, encourages them to continue their journey. Now photography, a modern invention, not only is a widely accepted artistic medium in its own right but also occupies an important place in contemporary visual culture. Only a few years have passed since digital photography has been introduced. In that short span of time, it has assumed the role of the main producer of visual imagery of our era and has practically replaced our eye. Kang Hong-Goo has been making digital photographs by manipulating popular cultural images with a scanner. His art evinces that digital photography provides new opportunities for those seeking a mode of expression that fits the time outside the art system.

Kang enrolled himself in an art school as an aspiring painter after having spent several years as an elementary school teacher. He initially majored in painting but soon began to explore a new direction in manipulated photography utilizing advertisement images and film stills. Kang states that the experimentation was in protest against the art system that is based on a standard composed by great, unique works. Kang, who calls himself a second-rate artist, not a top-rate genius artist, has been making preposterous and bizarre fake photographs with images appropriated from the mass media.

He deems the use of preexisting images more suitable than a handmade painting in expressing one's inability to resolve the conflicts of everyday life. His preferred display format-prints simply tacked up on a wall-emphasizes the easy and instant nature of computer-generated photography. In Kang's photography, the particular condition of the high-speed modernization of Korean society is combined with his personal experience of it. His photographs have unfolded in a series that explores "location, snobbery, fakery"-the title of his second solo exhibition.

Kang's early scanner-manipulated photography manifests the dis-eases and conflicts lodged deeply in people's minds despite the economic prosperity that has suddenly blossomed: surreal landscapes engulfed in fire (What Humans Can Do for Trees), patriarchal homes haunted by monsters (Home Sweet Home), and everyday scenes that reveal fears around the condition of the country's division (Warphobia). In another series of works, Kang casts himself as the protagonist in stills of fictional films. As the main actor in movies of gratuitous violence and sex, the artist creates dramas that mix narcissism and self-pity.

Art here is no longer a serious and sublime medium but is made into a series of stock images one would regularly see in cheap genre movies and commercial advertisements. In these crudely manipulated photographic representations, the artist-the director/actor-appearing in wonky guises turns despairs and disquietudes into a comedy (Who Am I). These photographs, made with a deliberate lack of refinement in order to divert the pressure to be creative, are believable representations of our reality, which is far from refined and polished in actuality. When Kang started using digital cameras, his surrealistic montages gradually converged with the impressions of Korean society the artist himself captured. This evolution arose from his belief that the contradictions of reality are greater than the contradictions that he creates.

When the digital camera first became available, its small memory forced Kang to make long panoramic landscapes by suturing many individual shots. These landscapes do not attempt to be faithful representation of the reality through an expansive, level gaze, however. They are recombinations of twisted impressions of a society put together piecemeal. As the artist has stated, Korea has leapfrogged from its pre-modern era to an era of information society in less than a generation, and consequently all kinds of contradictions that reflect the times and spaces that have been bypassed in the process clearly remain.

Kang's digital landscapes do not limn a future society ruled by a humankind that has evolved through advancements in science and technology. Instead, they are landscapes that harbor remnants from a process of modernization driven by a fascistic military culture and collective egotism. It is not straight photographic representation but manipulated montages of fragments that can better and more precisely capture a reality distorted and perverted by capitalism and commercialism in the midst of a compressed growth.

Recombining fragments from the inconsistent and rough surface of the reality, Kang's digital landscapes may be the most appropriate method of revealing its contradictions. His "Greenbelt," which depicts an area near Seoul designated for restricted development, appears to be less a nature's stronghold in an urban environment than traces of aging and deterioration left in the aftermath of a sudden development.

An agrarian society centered around villages has collapsed in the inevitable course of urbanization, and the remnants of the process compose not a green ideal but a gray, depressing landscape. On the other hand, his Drama Set, a "real fake" television film set, is situated in the impression of the Korean society dominated by fakery. It consists of images of people cut and paste onto a set in which the real and the fake are mixed up. Scenes temporally ranging from the period of Japanese colonization and to the present co-exist in a single space, highlighting the fallaciousness of the whole set-up.

Scene of Ohsoi-ri depicts an area that was abandoned after its residents were relocated in compensation for the noise pollution caused by the newly built Gimpo Airport just outside Seoul. The work suggests the sense of powerlessness the artist felt in this suburban area that had been sacrificed to the course of development. Even if viewers may not know the tragic ongoing story behind this town inhabited, by garbage and deserted kitchen gardens, they certainly sense in Kang's landscape, whose palette has been manipulated, the gloominess one would experience in a ghost town and creepy ghosts of the past. Like dark shadows hiding under the skyscrapers and flying overpasses of the city, this scene suggests to us what has been cast away in the name of development.

That our living environments haven't changed too much even in this 21st-century digital era is evident in the landscape images the artist has made of a redevelopment area in Bulgwang-dong in the far northern corner of Seoul where he lives. The houses in the image, congregating at the skirt of Mount Bukhan, are no longer places of residence but have become sites of vagrancy and speculation. Demolished for redevelopment, the site has become a surrealistic battlefield where nature and human intrusion go to war. After the houses built in harmony with the natural topography of the mountain valleys are all razed, there will be apartment buildings that advertise nature-friendly environmental living but block the sky with their soaring concrete masses (Mickey's House and Trainee).

The refracted imagery of Kang's digital photography lets shown through its distortions the times that he experienced and the reality of Korean society in which memories and histories are roughly entangled. Although the fragments produced by his digital camera cannot compose perfect landscapes, as long as we are surrounded by a reality that is unrealistic and phony, this may be the unavoidable result. Digital photography is becoming a crucial part of everyday life, and advancements in digital technologies are sure to control the society of the future.

Nevertheless, our minds and our surroundings still retain images of the past and the traumas of rapid transformations, continuing to sway us. In some sense, modernization is in the present progressive tense. Despite the great transformation that is the 21st-century information society, the physical realities of human beings and landscapes do not change so easily and still make up an important part of the reality we live in. Kang's digital landscapes are kaleidoscopic images of a society that struggles to be real. 

In order to confront a reality that is more fake than a fake, it is more effective to take a light approach to it than to assume a sincere, solemn attitude. In one work, Kang creates a scene of devastation with computer game character doll he found on a construction site near his studio, turning the doll into earth-shaking military fighter. In such manners, Kang's photography ultimately exhibits the artist's dogged journey like Don Quixote's through a changing world and rigid establishments.

Continuing through the 1990s into the present, his landscape series is an autobiographical confession by a maker, who struggles under the weight of institutions and reality but never gives up hope. The present exhibition encompasses Kang's exploration of digital photography over a decade and would perhaps become an example for the popular belief that a second-rate artist in the end becomes a top-rate artist. It would be more meaningful, however, to see this effort as an opportunity to witness as is the landscapes that this second-rate artist has traveled than as an occasion in which an artist's resistance to established art gets integrated into art history and establishment. 

References

• [비평] B급 작가가 찍은 디지털 풍경
  [Critique] Digital Landscapes by a Second-Rate Artist