Soon-Hak Kwon’s site specific photographs originate from ‘the psychology of the visual’. By creating images of blank walls, placed upon blank walls, Kwon deludes and confuses viewers with what essentially becomes an ‘illusionary space’. On approach, viewers are at first oblivious to the works, occupying ‘the moment before one identifies the world of things’. Upon further consideration, however, the subtleties of the pieces begin to make themselves apparent. Becoming hyper-realistic, every texture, scratch, screw and smudge is represented in extremely high resolution:

‘I shoot hundreds of photographs at a close distance from the surface of the wall, more like a scanning process rather than a shooting process, and digitally stitch them together in order to depict, in a way, all the details more realistic than reality. I want to
provide a sense of paradox as I am presenting the non-thing to some-thing.’

Drawing from his own experience with the Isakower Phenomenon in his infancy, Kwon intends to create a ‘photograph without subject, yet a subject itself’. For these reasons, the pieces are exceptionally uncanny. Kwon reinforces the illusionary experience and awakens the viewer into conversing with the gallery space. This ‘conflicts with the perception that an artwork should represent an ideal of what is assumed to be far away’, and are thus a particularly current praise to the ‘here and now’.

Soon-Hak Kwon graduated from the University of Incheon College of Fine Arts with a B.F.A in Painting, Hongik University with an M.F.A in Photography and the Royal College of Art with an MA in Photography. He has enjoyed four solo exhibitions and participated in several group exhibitions in Seoul, London, and Paris. He won the gold prize in the 9th Competition of Chang-Jark Arts’ Association (Korea, 2004), and the prize for selected artists in the 8th Joong-Ang Fine Arts Prize (Korea, 2006). He lives and works in London.