Installation view of 《Water Photoautomat》 (Space DDF, 2024) © Yun Taejun

Yun Taejun was born in Seoul in 1987 and is currently based in Seoul and Gwangju. He regards photography not simply as a tool of documentation, but as a “transformative device” that reconstructs the ways in which bodies and objects are perceived.

Through this, he closely explores the gap between materiality and immateriality that exists between physical reality and the digital world, and seeks the possibility of new sensory experiences. With the development of optical technology, the world has moved away from being perceived directly through the body and has shifted into a structure in which it is re-experienced through photography and digital screens.

This process of mediation expands the layers of experience while redefining the relationship between the body and objects. The artist pays attention to the aspects of this transformation and explores how media reorganize the forms of perception. His work focuses on experimentally expanding the possibilities and limits of the photographic medium at the point where bodily sensation, objects, data, and contemporary modes of representation meet.

He takes the sensory gap revealed through the collision between the smooth expressiveness of digital images and the materiality of the real world as a starting point for visual transformation and reinterpretation. Through the multilayered sensory experience constructed between print media and the screen, he reveals the photographic medium as a device of representation, transformation, and sensory expansion, and newly proposes the structure of perceptual experience.

Photography, which began from light, began as an act of looking clearly at something. The act of “seeing” came to make it possible to gaze more accurately and clearly at visible objects through the machine called the camera. This technology, marked by science, came to stop gazing at conceptual, cultural, or mirage-like objects.

The structure of Western civilization, built upon scientific coherence, no longer contains mirage-like ghosts. The object that the camera must gaze at is only an electromagnetically stable form capable of reflecting light.

Time flows linearly, and it can never go back, nor does it give us the opportunity to stop and gaze at something. Things that are not recorded easily disappear. Yet records fragment time and alter objects. They serve to gather scattered traces and summon the past into the present, but a scene recorded in a photograph is like a phantom of memory.

Although photography appears to stop time, in reality it creates a distorted memory of a moment. A scene recorded as an image only evokes the illusion of remembering, and those moments drift within the flow of time like buoys.

Installation view of 《Water Photoautomat》 (Space DDF, 2024) © Yun Taejun

The attempt to summon something again through photography is ultimately no different from collecting phantoms. Such phantoms are remembered as clear records and, at the same time, as faint records like ghosts. This inevitably leaves one no choice but to feel around the surroundings and imagine.

The process of visualizing, as photographic data, objects that cannot be physically brought back or represented is like an act of collecting fragments. Taking the fragments left behind by those who have been forgotten and become ghosts as buoys, one feels along faint traces. Through this, one attempts to gather, collect, reorganize, and create something.

The work Water Photoautomat embodies, as an image, a faint experience triggered by a single image. This process signifies an attempt to summon back into the present those who have evaporated from reality, but their appearance is not whole.

It is merely a fragment pulled out from time that has passed, and only an attempt to gather broken fragments and summon them into the present. It is an attempt to collect those who wander in the space of the city, small traces drifting like buoys, and call them forth as visual forms.

Ultimately, this attempt is a futile struggle to grasp objects that the camera cannot record, along with their time and traces. In that process, we encounter the paradox that the concrete and realistic image called photography is, on the contrary, fantastical.

Such an image can never become a complete representation; rather, it is an act that proves, in itself, a ghostlike lack of substance. This is a process of constantly challenging that impossibility, even while recognizing that oblivion cannot be avoided.

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