Primal Selfie, 2024

Hyunjoo Chung

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 At the entrance of the exhibition, 15 round mirrors are placed on the dark, weighty floor of the corridor. We are met with images of objects that once were water. Almost instinctively, we stop, as if discovering a small puddle, and bend down to take a closer look. The qualities of water are evoked through the image of the world reflected on its surface, the objects floating with its flow and their shadows, and the bottom that becomes visible through water’s transparency. The experience of water is thus projected onto the image of what was once water.

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 Now, a face floats quietly on the surface, staring back. Who is it? The image is unclear. The mechanical image, compressed into water, reflects the person capturing it. From the other side, she gazes back at me, framed against the sky, with tiny particles drifting on the water’s surface. The face, sky, and trees on the opposite side ripple and distort with the undulating waves.

Wasn’t photography about inscribing the shape of the subject onto its surface, like a fingerprint? The photograph preserves the moment when the photographer captured her own reflection on the water. And we see what we already know. The contemplative gaze of the viewer encounters the past. The noeme of “has-been” does not belong to the painting. In an age of virtual reality and AI replication, the noeme of existence merely exposes our unconsciousness about seeing. The camera’s eye, a mechanical device, proves the photograph belongs to this world—that it is real. Yet, the artist skillfully erases the camera by overlapping two photographs with different framings.

 

 The photographs, where the camera has been erased, resemble the perceptual experience of gazing at one’s reflection on the water’s surface. What the viewer sees while bending down to look into the mirror is the photographer’s perspective, framed through the camera’s eye, of an event that occurred in the past. The variations in hairstyles and backgrounds in each image give the impression that the captured time and space differ. At times, the surface of the water ripples and quakes, yet the reflection remains of a single person, captured from the same angle. By skillfully erasing the camera in this arrangement, the artist’s act of gazing at the water’s surface subtly overlaps with the viewer’s act of confronting a mirror with no way to penetrate it.

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“Water was the mirror of the world in the beginning.” The ‘replication’ of water and mirrors, which reflect everything, is strangely arranged in the encounter between the gazing and the gazed-upon faces. Suddenly, from the surface of the photograph, a space begins, and the one who faces the other in this reversed world is no longer alone. In this way, the face and gaze on the other side of the surface awaken the realization that the world I belong to might, in fact, be the world beneath the water. Like a dark night filled with dreams, the moment when the camera disappears and I encounter the other creates a meaning entwined with enchantment, dissolving logical explanations and commonly accepted understandings. Primal Selfie is a self-portrait ‘painted’ by a machine, leading us to question the noeme—that photography captures reality—challenging that very belief itself.

 

​Excerpt from A Gaze upon Seulki Ki’s Gaze -Geist (ghosts) in the Exhibition, the Viewer, and the Return of Being