Page 27 - PHOTODOT 2017년 4월호 VOL.41 April

A house, a living organism
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After taking the motifs of his works from homes, he explored redevelopment areas in order to chron-
icle houses before they disappeared. These houses were fraught with damage. Their gates, windows,
and roofs were no longer intact even though they might have been occupied not too long ago. Out of
curiosity, he entered each of them to discover what their interiors looked like. All of the household
goods had moved with their owners, but each individual’s history and memories had been left behind.
He read into the stories that people had left there. He suddenly came up with a concept in which a
home is not a mere concrete block but an organism that coexists with humans. This caused him to
want to document deteriorating houses even more. He thought he had just started to collect images
of houses even though nothing had been decided for his work. He began to travel around the country
and photograph houses. With his camera he captured a variety of houses such as tile-roofed houses,
slate-roofed houses, houses owned by Japanese people during the period of Japanese colonial rule,
houses by the Saemaeul Undong (the new community movement), and rather recently-built slab hous-
es and classified them by region, type, and form.
Crossing the borders
Chuu’s work concerning homes stays away from the traditional method of photography. His photos
cause viewers to feel perplexed and confused by their ambiguous identity and where or not they are
actually photos. He is interested in the fact that his shots cannot be easily defined in a word and he
seems to enjoy the way his work has evolved. Much like his photographs, he has lived a liberal life, not
wedded to any one frame or style.
The myriad of home images that Chuu has gleaned have been separated from their original back-
grounds. Some are reborn into new landscapes as soon as they are transferred to a canvas with paint
(That Village, That Landscape). In other cases, a city is formed with countless images of such homes in
a way that resembles fish scales (Scales). A two-dimensional work can now and then turn into a relief
as in Flexible Thinking on Houses.
Chuu’s work is almost like a form of discipline to cultivate the mind to attain enlightenment. He kept
spatial expansion in mind while working on the serialized work Scales. As he used canvases in lieu of
frames, it took him one to three months to complete a single work of art. The pieces he adopts are
no more than 1x2 cm. His work process that entails cutting out and gluing together hundreds of thou-
sands of pieces was more difficult than he expected and yet he has not given up this way of working
as it fits well with his intent to do something slowly and surely.
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