WON Seoung Won: The Sight of the Others
Won Seoung Won takes thousands of photographs and creates something real from her unrealistic imagination through an intricate photo-collage process. This is Won’s unique creative procedure where she reorganizes the most appropriate images she collected from the long journeys into a narrative structure. Won accentuates the three-dimensional effect by taking numerous photographs of a single part, which physically appears to be one lump. The increase of image layers in comparison to the previous works, presents a frame more convincing than reality. Won Seoung Won collages time and space, unravels the narrative in an intriguing way to induce the eyes of the audience to the picture surpassed of time and space.
The new series of works presented in the solo exhibition, “The Sight of the Others” unveil the occupational platform of journalists · IT specialists · professors · pharmacists · finance specialists · government officers · researchers.
Won has been interested in the issue of whether ‘jobs define people’s identities’ as she interacted with people of different professions. And she expresses the seven professions he indirectly experienced through them into different landscapes. The jobs that everyone admires have definite and professional qualities, thus forming its peculiar aura. When we look closer into these superb jobs popular in the society, they all involve similar dilemma and difficulties like any other jobs. Won portrays the gap between the professions that seemed special from a far and the general rigors within those jobs through animals and landscapes. The disparate and unfamiliar sight presented by Won Seoung Won is a reflection of our society. The society of men is unfolded realistically upon the pictorial frame, but it is to find comfort in the fact that this tragic narrative is rather beautiful than being hollow or distressful.
Won Seoung Won was born in 1972 in Korea. She graduated from Chungang University, Seoul, and received her M.F.A. in 2002 from the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf and M.F.A. in Media Art in 2005 from the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Germany. Her solo exhibitions include “Skeptical Orgy,” Podbielsky Contemporary, Berlin, Germany (2014); “Character Episode I,” Artside Gallery, Seoul (2013); “1978, My Age of Seven,” Gana Contemporary, Seoul (2010); “Tomorrow,” alternative space LOOP, Seoul; and Gana-beaubourg, Paris, France (2005). Won’s works are included in the permanent collections of international museums and institutions including Osthaus Museum, Hagen, Germany; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, USA; Fidelity Worldwide Investment, USA; Kunsthaus Lempertz, Cologne, Germany; Museum of Photography Seoul, Korea; Seoul Museum of Art, Korea; Geonggi MOMA, Korea; Goeun Art Foundation, Korea. Won currently lives and works in Seoul.
