Installation view of 《Tyltyl Mytyl》 (Plan B Project Space, 2021) © Plan B Project Space

In The Blue Bird, a play by Belgian playwright and poet Maurice Maeterlinck, the main characters are the siblings Tyltyl and Mytyl. In Korea, they are known as Chirr-Chirr and Michil, names transliterated from the Japanese translation. The Blue Bird, which tells the story of Tyltyl and Mytyl’s adventure in search of the blue bird, contains the lesson that hope is not far away, but close at hand.

The title of photographer Dongkyung Kwak’s first solo exhibition, held at Plan B Project Space in Seodaemun until the 23rd, is 《Tyltyl Mytyl》(Plan B Project Space, 2021).

Kwak’s landscape photographs are not images that try to cram things in or fill the frame. They are things that cannot be spoken, things that are empty. The artist seeks to collect small, passing, “continuous and ordinary” things from his surroundings.

Every act of searching for the possibility that photography can function within this self-imposed limit resembles the hope of The Blue Bird. The photographs, which contain only minimal indications without a clear narrative, can feel unfamiliar, much like the names “Tyltyl” and “Mytyl.”

Kwak removes temporality and excludes symbolic elements. Rather than spectacular images, he concentrates on observing things that are plain. He photographs and collects images by erasing narrative methods and leaving the process to chance.

Dongkyung Kwak, 510kilometer #1, 2021, Single channel video, B&W, 3min 40sec. © Dongkyung Kwak

Through the collected images, he seeks to speak of things without meaning, the remainders of meaning, and things that have been neutrally abandoned. In other words, he lets go of the obsession that photography must deliver a message and form a narrative.

“If photography speaks of something historical, would it not be the photograph itself that speaks, rather than me?” This is the artist’s blue-bird-like hope.

The exhibition presents around 40 selected representative works from the series '510 kilometer,' 'LAND landscape,' 'Remainder Theorem,' and 'Exhalation,' which the artist has produced over the past ten years, through photography and video works.

The 'Exhalation' series is a series of seascapes photographed by breathing onto the lens, creating an effect that resembles the use of a filter. The 'Remainder Theorem' series consists of landscapes that the artist found interesting—ordinary and continuous, yet somehow unusual. Its first subject was the railroad apartment building in front of Mindungsan Station in Taebaek.

The series began when the artist saw an enormous number of banners hung around the railroad apartment, one of the old and worn apartment buildings in the declining Taebaek region after the downturn of the coal industry, in proportion to the desire for redevelopment.

Alongside his question of whether photography should contain a social message, the series became an opportunity for the artist to reaffirm his attitude toward his own photography. Through it, he formed an artistic attitude that seeks to speak of things without meaning, the remainders of meaning, and things that have been neutrally abandoned. 

Dongkyung Kwak, LAND Landscape #2, 2021, Pigment print, 40.6x50.8cm © Dongkyung Kwak

The 'LAND Landscape' series begins from memories of the artist’s childhood. It was made as he suddenly looked back on his childhood memories of begging his father, who had to go to work seven days a week without a day off, to take him to an amusement park.

“I realized that I had taken away my father’s rest, while also forcing my mother to work in his place.”

The artist deliberately shoots on cloudy or foggy days, tries to remove as much saturation as possible, or adds the labor of changing already-taken photographs to the desired colors through post-production.

'510kilometer' is a work from the period when the artist was thinking about what he should photograph. At the time, believing that photography should naturally record a social message, he began photographing the Nakdong River, where the Four Major Rivers Project was then in full swing.

Because the artist’s hometown is Busan, the place was also familiar to him, and it was an appropriate subject for exploring how things operate when he tried to “cram a message into” the photograph. Geographically, the work was made as he walked and photographed from Busan to Andong, where a major tributary of the Nakdong River begins. He photographed it on black-and-white film over approximately three years.

Dongkyung Kwak graduated from the Department of Photography, Video and Media at Sangmyung University and studied Visual Culture at the Graduate School of Korea University. He explores the point where outer landscapes and inner landscapes overlap, and quietly gives voice to the fact that photography cannot hold reality in place. He is currently interested in paradoxical phenomena that are clear yet invisible.

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