Page 6 - 원정상 개인전 2025. 12. 3 – 12. 10 KT&G상상마당 춘천갤러리

We Were “Here” Within the Depths of Hundreds of Millions of Years

- Kim SoheeCurator(Hanmi Museum of Photography Research Institute)

The portrait of stone carries an expansive narrative of time. Long before humans interpreted the world, nature had
already inscribed immense temporal structures within matter, and photography became a medium capable of
recording their weight and trace. Among natural forms, stone is perhaps the most condensed archive of such history—
a material that compresses millions of years of geological change into a single form. As both a cross-section of
nature’s vast timeline and a vessel of Earth’s memory, stone embodies earthly and cosmic time and has long inspired
photographers, philosophers, and myth-makers alike.

While phenomenology viewed objects as “presence as they appear,” contemporary object-oriented philosophy
considers stone an active being endowed with agency. It exists in relation to the world prior to human interpretation,
recording time and transformation through its very materiality. Mythic traditions similarly linked stone to eternity,
cyclical time, and the origins of civilization. From ancient monuments to the debris of modern cities, stone has marked
thresholds between humans and the world, offering layers of meaning for contemplation.

Photography deepens this ontological resonance. In Niépce’s earliest images, stone architecture formed the unmoving
backdrop upon which the world first appeared through light. Nineteenth-century geological and landscape
photography further revealed nature’s temporal strata through stone. Across these histories, stone has come to
symbolize the “deep time” uniquely shared by nature and photography.

Won Jeong-sang’s fourth solo exhibition, Strata of Memory, is rooted in this symbolism and temporality. Through
earlier projects—from salt fields to light and water, from wind to funerary ritual—the artist explored emergence,
disappearance, and finitude. In this new series, he turns to the traces left behind by change: the sedimented time
embodied in stone. To encounter the surface of stone is to face the invisible thickness of geological and existential time.

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