Page 6 - 박광린 개인전 2025. 9. 26 – 10. 1 아트프라자갤러리

Park Kwang-lin’s Abstract Photography and the Temporality of Durée

- Text by Mo Hee (Curator, Perigee Gallery)

In Park Kwang-lin’s photographic universe, the familiar and the unfamiliar coexist in a delicate tension. His abstract images
evoke landscapes that feel distant yet strangely resonant—fragments of life that once passed unnoticed now emerge with
quiet intensity. These scenes, situated beyond the boundaries of the known, prompt a reconsideration of what we see and
what we seek to see. The perceptual instinct that once attempted to tame the unfamiliar ultimately turns inward, guiding us
toward what Henri Bergson called our “inner and conscious life.” 1 Park’s abstract photography cultivates this inner awareness
through a dialectical structure between unfamiliarity and familiarity. When the artist reflects that he has “once again confronted
himself” through his decades-long practice, it is not a gesture of nostalgia. Rather than viewing the past as fixed and distant,
Park navigates a living temporality—where the past animates the present and gestures toward the future.

Surface as Landscape, Image as Material
Park approaches the photographic subject not as a document of the external world, but as a variable in an aesthetic experiment.
What initially appears as abstract and ambiguous gradually reveals traces of the familiar—cracked earth, weathered concrete,
peeling paint, and layered flyers. These surfaces, rendered through Park’s lens, become compositional elements that verge on
abstraction. Reconstructed as visual material rather than static objects, these elements form a multilayered field of meaning.
The interplay of color, texture, and pattern—once familiar—now evokes a sense of estrangement. The subject, mediated
through the camera, detaches from concrete reality and transforms into an abstract image, compressing time and space into a
visual surface. Thus, the image simultaneously constitutes an abstract landscape and remains a trace of tangible reality.

This dialectic is embedded in the duality of surface and material. The tension between recognition and alienation leads to a
renewed understanding of photography—not as a medium that merely points to what exists or has vanished, but as one that
visually embodies layered temporalities and the residues of memory. Park’s photographs do not freeze a single moment; they
become fields of overlapping time, where physical traces and invisible flows converge.

Photography and the Temporality of Durée
The conventional notion of photography as a medium that “captures the moment” is reconfigured in Park’s work. For Bergson,
time is not a sequence of discrete instants but a continuous flow—durée—experienced internally. A “moment” is not a fleeting

1. Henri Bergson, translated by Hyunsoo Cho, The History of Understanding Time, Greenbee, 2024, p.124.

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