Roh, Hyoung Kwan, who graduated from the Seoul Institute of the Arts with major in Photography and currently researching further implicature on photograph at the Graduate School of Industrial Arts of the Hongik University, is a young artist who has been attempting photographic arts work with his body as an objet d’ art. He deals with his physical body to the point of being somewhat cruel in order to endow facial features that are infallible to his emotions, in particular, the abstract concept of pain, and captured such performance on photographs. In his work <Respiration>, he is metaphorizing his body to a breathless lump of meat. He photographed his extreme circumstances by binding a strap around his body and hanging himself on a hook, through the strap in a butcher shop in Majang-dong, thereby creating image of being hung himself like a lump of meat, followed by image of laying down on a large chopping block in the same butcher’s shop. His works can be seen as efforts towards presentation of answers on what true anguish is to no other but himself. Taking all of one’s cloths off and explicitly revealing every minute details of his genitals and every strand of his genital hair appears to be manifestation of his volition to convince himself of the essence of the internal and external agony that he is experiencing, rather than enforcing or conveying certain messages to others. What needs to be particularly paid attention to is the image of the artist that is blurrily reflected on the aluminum panel lining both sides of escalator in a subway station, which is a rather crude location for a naked body to be seen. The identity of what it is that caused him to agonize to the point of enticing him to hang himself in a butcher shop appears to be confession on state of disintegration of self that continually disperse rather than integrating. The artist is now in his early 30’s, but the photographs presented in this exhibition captured the images of the artist himself in his late 20’s.
