Exhibition commemorating the opening of Style Cube Zandari
Contents of the Exhibition
Joo MyeongDuck is a man of unique urban sensibility. Considering the fact that he's photographed for 40 years, it may be understandable. And for those years he has observed the ever-changing city, Seoul. It would not be hard to see the reason his recent works are named Townscape rather than Cityscape, if we could imagine how Seoul looked like 40 years before and what was Joo MyeongDuck's works like. While Seoul, once having been a small town, has grown as one of metropolitans in the world, a youth curious about photography has grown up to be a inignorable producer of visual images. Maybe that is the reason why the landscapes of Seoul reflected on his eyes and camera lens appear not as a grotesquely gigantic nor cold, but as a familiar urban ground of living.
In the exhibition Townscape Joo MyeongDuck makes artificial constructions, landscape architecture, and the sky exquisitely reconciled. It needs multiple solutions to catch these elements, sometimes in antagonistic relation and sometimes in relation of master and servant, in a single picture as a harmonious whole. He captures such moments in a rainy afternoon, in a dark night or in a dazzlingly clear day, … and the like. Something more powerful might have been needed to unite those various expressions of each moments. Joo MyeongDuck knew what that must be: 'flow of the air'. In this sense, Townscape of Joo MyeongDuck is comparable with one of the past exhibitions, Landscape. 'Flow of the air' densely captured in his pictures get more hard thanks to the expressiveness of the sky. That may be the reason in some of his pictures the sky particularly sets off.
One more thing we shouldn't miss is 'flow of the time' as important as flow of the air. An alley alongside the Midopa building behind which appears the Chosun Hotel, the garden of the Hotel Shilla looks pressed under weighty eaves, shadow of a tree splendidly cast on a pillar of the squared building of the Sejong Center, waving leaves aside the Kyobo building, the district of Hongik Univ. where lightings entangled disorderly, a window of a café though which the Namsan tower shows itself on a rainy day, … .
In various places moments the artist seized lap over. Thereupon we've intended to call the recent pictures of Joo MyeongDuck Townscape, rather than Cityscape.
Kum-soo Choi |
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