Exhibition Information

Vacant Room #0_Geumgye-dong, Naju 57
2015 Inkjet Print 120x90cm

Vacant Room #3_Jungang-dong, Naju 114-2
2015 Inkjet Print 50x76cm

Vacant Room #41_Baekya-myeon, Wolya-myeon, Hampyeong-gun 589-1
2015 Inkjet Print 120x90cm

Vacant Room #55_Deokrim-dong, Gwangsan-gu, Gwangju 699-7
2015 Inkjet Print 76x50cm

			Vacant Room

Most residents moved and houses were demolished in a short period of time as a project to restore the old wall was carried out near a workroom in Naju, South Jeolla Province, from a few years ago. I looked around empty houses ahead of demolition and thought I wanted to take a portrait of the houses that are about to disappear. As I wanted to take a picture of the last spring in a small room where I would have looked at the yellow rape flowers that always bloomed in the garden every spring, I started to take pictures of the room with a camera obscura. 
The first shot, through a small hole in the dark room, received a call from her mother saying she was ill when yellow flowers in the yard began to bloom. Three days later, my mother underwent a major operation and died after fifteen days. It was the spring of 2014. I lived through hell. As the youngest and eldest son, I couldn't express my sadness in front of people, and it was only when I was left alone that I had no choice but to ask my mother to show up in front of me even as a ghost. He left his home where he had lived for more than 20 years and moved to a strange city as if he were running away. I lost my father, grandmother and mother in one house, and the fact became an unbearable trauma and severely choked me. But I still sometimes hang around in front of the house now.  
By the end of that year, I caught the camera again. When I came to my senses, I had to search for another empty house as the workroom was already demolished and reconstruction was under way. And thought, taking pictures like labor, like obsessive. What is home to me? What was home again for those who had to leave their homes overnight after spending so long with their owners' smell? One day I came out of the room after a long shoot in the darkness and sat down against the floor pillar, facing an indescribably bright light, and I felt as if I had awakened from a dream, and I mumbled with longing. Is it really nowhere to be found just because it disappeared from reality? Is it really nothing just because you can't see it and can't? Wasn't she just moved to some other world I couldn't see?
You can find out the strange properties of light and pictures when you are filming a room. Because of its good lighting, the statue is more visible in the northern room, where people do not receive direct light all day rather than in a warm, cool, southern-facing room in the winter. When you get used to the dark, you can see the dark inside. I saw a dance in which the dazzling scenery of the yard mingled together in a dark and cold northern room as if time had stopped. It didn't matter how far the room was and how far the yard was. I might have wanted to meet the world that my mother had moved to, watching the two worlds inside and outside encounter as if it were a dream. 

Cho Hyun-Taek