Exhibition Information

			While Still-Life Moves
Inchan Hwang, Poet


1 Borges’ novel Funes the Memorious is like a little mockery of reality and human consciousness. The genius of memory Funes never goes to sleep, and remembers every moment he witnessed with his eyes open. This is why he cannot be aware of the continuity of an existence, and cannot accept the fact that yesterday’s tree is a continuous being of today’s tree. Every being is becoming something else every second, physically and chemically, so strictly speaking his perception would be correct. This story is eventually an allegory of oblivion and sleeplessness. The world is maintained by forgetfulness and confusion, and this system works when you close your eyes to the fact that the person who went to sleep today is totally different from the person who wakes up tomorrow. It is a very precise and correct account of which usage is difficult to find.


2 Perhaps the photographs of Woochul Jang are focusing on such a story of having difficulty finding a proper usage. As the photos are ever-so rigorous, proper, and delicate, it is such a thing which you wouldn’t know where to use at all. But a beautiful thing with no boundary to its beauty, precisely because of this reason.


3 The flowers and fruits he had photographed are at the brink of explosion. Until I viewed his photos, I was not aware that a flower could be an exploding being, and that it is always at a state of right-before-explosion. A small bud would swell little by little and then at some point, it explodes without anybody being aware of this magnificent show. Such glare and commotion are the essence and element proper of the flower. However, we are not mindful of the flower’s explosion due to the different time span lived by flowers and humans. Yet Woochul Jang’s photography seems to capture the time of flowers.


4 'Ah, it's like a genuine perverse image'
This was my impression that I had when I first saw his flower and fruit photo series. I didn’t know where this thought sprang from. I was simply amazed at the overflowing sexual tension. This time, once I viewed his works gathered under the title COLUMNED, I could gradually realize. Such peculiar tension was entailed by the subtle sense delicately capturing the possibility of the subject. The vital energy of flowers and fruits, of their tiny but overly eager organs, was trying to shoot out through the slow timeline, and Woochul Jang’s photo has picked up the very moment. (Why would he have saved only such reddish tones?) And at that moment, his subject transforms from the flower and fruit that we know. As it were, metamorphosis indicates the state of larva and pupa transforming themselves to become their proper form. In this sense, they are very transformative photos.


5 Then I was truly stunned at how he photographs portraits. He had captured plants in their wriggling state, but humans are portrayed almost as utterly still life. Never a full face. Even the muscles taut with tension are rendered to look like a fixed statute, and such are images of bizarre moments. Look at the men thrown to the ground by gravity’s pull. They look almost asleep. Even the head in flight looks extremely comfortable.


6 The site where victory and defeat take place. The space where trained bodies compete with each other. The time when everything is decided and divided by the distribution of power and balance. Woochul Jang’s photography is interested in such moments of radical tension. In essence, it is not quite different from taking photos of flowers. It is about sensing the explosive power embodied in the subject, and fixating the state of tension mixed with a dose of irony.


7 When physical tension explodes, the mind relaxes. The moment when the winner is decided after the intersection of power vs. power, amid the delirium of not realizing whether I’ve won or lost, the possibility of being expands without any limits. Woochul Jang’s photography captures the state of unlimited deferment, the state of eternal oblivion. That is, his photography seems to follow a methodology completely opposite of that of Funes the Memorious. That of being a genius of forgetting. By severing the continuity of objects, this method renders the object eternal and limitless.


8 'Columned' could be a word which englobes both balance and tension. Between the rhythm created by alternating animal and plant. Between this strange dissonance and harmony.


9 When I met him a while ago, I asked him if he likes flowers. He replied he goes to the flower market on the last day on purpose. To get those which have withered a little bit or grown of their own accord.