HERE: Photographs by Seokmin Ko

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Art Projects International is pleased to present HERE, an exhibition of select limited-edition photographs by Korean artist Seokmin Ko.  This exhibition highlights major works from two of Ko’s multi-year photographic projects that masterfully captures and reflects the artist’s unique expression of human sensibilities and resulted in Ko’s two internationally recognized solo exhibitions in the United States: The Square and Strip Show.  At only 28 years old, sensitive and insightful beyond his years, Ko and his US solo exhibitions received significant attention and acclaim worldwide.  These images are subtly moving and sensitive reflections of life — of being in the world and not of the world.
 
In 2012, the limited-edition photographic works in The Square offered viewers a rare glimpse of being in the world — the ephemeral, the temporal, the frailty — as a solitary mirror is used to reflect its surroundings in a field, or in the sea, or on a country road.  Two hands gripping the mirror’s edge are the only clue of the artist’s presence.  In cityscapes, modernist architecture or urban fixtures are featured; here, the human hand, the slight presence of humanity, is seen amidst the reflective surfaces of glass and steel construction.
 
Ko pointedly lets the viewer know the holder or director of the mirror is not innocent.  In one photograph the mirror is oriented so the painted lines on a rainy country road continue in the reflection of the mirror and then again beyond it.  In another, a mirror leans against a tree which borrows a reflected trunk to become whole while the holder’s gloves are simply placed.  No person is visible, yet the gloves stand in for the human.
 
The patterning reflection in the mirror is never a seamless match with the mirror’s immediate surroundings; these works are not about tricking the viewer.  In Ko’s images, the human, as the carrier of artifice, is a kind of discrepancy and belongs neither in the natural world nor in the constructed world.  This is obvious in the architectural photographs where the human presence disrupts the dehumanizing machine-made grid.  Ko’s is a humanist vision amidst a world that has become foreign to its inhabitants as creators, but as Einstein famously said, “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”  Ko’s disruptions offer hope.
 
Select images from the series Strip Show, massive in size, often unvariegated structures look digitally generated, plopped into photographed landscapes.  But they are not.  This is the moment: the real becomes a not-so-convincing phantom of itself.  Ko plays on the sophistication of the contemporary eye that can discern CGI in a nanosecond.  In front of Ko’s photographs, the eye calls fake and the artist responds, “not so fast.”
 
In one work, a large featureless blue building rests amid scrub on the far end of an empty dirt lot.  In another, Tetris, a monumental nondescript structure (also windowless) abutting lush green trees on an open field is all too surreal with only the hint of a doorway and a vehicle to give one a sense of place.  Ko takes pains to find his decisive structures; a logo may be stripped from the final image, but the viewer, too, could leave the gallery and locate each of the depicted environments.
 
In Ko’s photograph Squared, a massive, aging, industrial wall wraps around a foreground of grass and lush vegetation, its faded, pied coloring the backdrop of an endlessly postponed video game battle.  The photographs, having stopped the viewer, return to their original art function.  They facilitate reconsideration of the world that remains.  The photographs also reflect the viewer’s expectant gaze, provoke consideration of the future, and are both portals and transformative objects.
 
Ko’s White Flower is the final limited-edition photographic print of The Square series where the mirror has grown in both size and intention; to take on an other-worldly sense offering the image seen — the viewer’s dimension — is simply one way to be of the world.

SEOKMIN KO (b. 1984, Gunsan, Korea) is a recipient of many prestigious awards including the 2012 SongEun ArtCube Artist award. His first U.S. solo exhibition Seokmin Ko: The Square was presented in 2012 at Art Projects International, New York. Other solo exhibitions include HERE: Photographs by Seokmin Ko, Art Projects International, NY (2025); Seokmin Ko: Strip Show, Art Projects International, NY (2014); Seokmin Ko, Shinsegae Gallery, Gwangju, Korea (2013); and Seokmin Ko: The Square, SongEun ArtCube, Seoul (2012). Recent exhibitions include Color as Space, Art Projects International, NY (2022); New Works, Art Projects International, NY (2019); Blurred Horizons, Art Projects International, NY (2018); Not Your Ordinary Art Storage, SongEun ArtStorage, Seoul (2017); Mirror Mirror, Spacemom Museum of Art, Chongju, Korea (2016), Summer Love, SongEun Art Space, Seoul (2015), and FOTOSEPTIEMBRE USA, San Antonio, TX (2014). His work is represented in major collections including the Fidelity Corporate Art Collection, Boston; Montefiore Collection, New York; and SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation, Seoul. Reviews and feature articles about Seokmin Ko have appeared in major publications including ARTnews, CNN Photos, Photo+, and Art in Culture.

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For more information: 
https://artprojects.com/exhibitions/here-photographs-by-seokmin-ko/