Page 69 - PHOTODOT 2017년 8월호 VOL.45 Jul

Yong-hwan Lee
《Political Landscape》

Coexistence of virtual and reality Seoul Korea, 2014

By Da-in Kim, journalist (kdainy@naver.com)
The everyday scenes we see seem to be always the
same, but not so. The scenery that shifts on the given situation
of the contemporary contains the shape of life that has rapidly
changed. The ever higher walls that block our sight in his photo-
graphs prevent us from seeing the landscape beyond. However, the
photographs of Yong-hwan Lee depict the coexistence in a strange
way of both the landscapes that are blocked and the new ones
created by the blockage. The modern people who face the new
things emerge in one morning and live today’s lives that are never
the same as the day before may not see those landscapes. Just as we
may have to take a step backward to see the wider landscape, we
can find the hidden aspects of our society from a single footprint
away in his somewhat temperate photographs.

In day to day lives, concentrating on the land-
scapes
One day, he came across with installed heras that are printed
with foreign landscape pictures at the construction site by Yangjae
stream that entered into our lives. Then, he found those heras that
are disguised as if they are part of the landscapes, in place to place
in the city. Ever since, he photographed those sceneries not only
in Seoul but wherever he traveled. Yong-hwan Lee witnessed there
is another whole small scaled world of nature in the palaces or
the mansions while traveling in Japan. He saw people’s behavior of
possession, confining the reduced world of nature with landscape
stones and bonsai in a garden and thought it was like a political act
of nature. He also noticed that the virtual space became a part of
daily life, and bogus nature that replaced the real natural world was
composing the city spaces. Young-hwan Lee also found our daily
life is now beyond the control from the traditional ways and a new
form of social relations are taking place through SNS. He focused
on the new landscape created by another form of daily lives with
social networks through various media even thought our practical
lives are based on present existence. He also began to work with
the question of what daily live we live in, focusing on the fact that
the political landscape in a modern society has existed for a long
Los Angeles , 2016
time.

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