2015-2025
Through these cruising spots, I have learned so much about my community's rich history and the challenges we have faced. Including the chance to explore the places where people gathered since Victorian times, the parks that got the worst of policing and social changes in the 1980s, and how, despite all the odds, these spaces have always flourished.
Drawing inspiration from Antonioni’s Blow-up – the act of magnifying places and images is a constant theme that I revisit and reconsider – I approach these spaces with a clinical yet neutral lens. Through my work, I see photography as a powerful tool to challenge the existing social structures, both in public and private spaces.
I am particularly interested in developing a new visual language that captures these otherwise invisible places and preserves them from fading away. This new way of seeing originates from the silence often found in the cruising experience. It draws from a unique form of nonverbal communication, rich with gestures, glances, and body language. This leads to what I would call the new semiotics of cruising, which invites a more profound reflection on photography and its boundaries.
2016
I have been exploring the flux between the city as an organism and nature's attempts to coexist with it.
Soul is a project that deals with how nature tries to make a space for itself inside the city, specifically in Seoul's constant metropolitan expansion. This project also explores the duality of South Korean society: extraordinarily modern but very traditional, with ancestral costumes rooted in the collective imaginary.
Analog to this, the same duality is reflected in the relationship that exists between the metropolis and nature. In a city that tries to find a place for the natural in a completely artificial context. In the same way, it is a society that looks to the future from the traditional.
In the end, a question remains: Is nature fighting back, or are we getting to a place where we are fighting for her?
2013-2014
Deracination is a photographic project that follows the traces of nomadic shepherds during their stay in the Manchay region of Peru.
They travel across the country with their families and cattle, looking for the vegetation that grows in the desert when the fog arrives during the winter.
The project discusses people, a locality, and even nature, which is transient and continuously evolving.
2013
Bucolics is a project that explores the idealization of the landscape and how this is affected as the city grows. It also addresses the traces left by human beings and how these traces signify humanity's need to civilize everything.
The paths and structures convey a mark inscribed into the transitioning landscape. That transit has no owner, leaving us open to the future of these regions, allowing us to idealize them once again.
-----------------
On the Transgression of the Bucolic
We speak of the bucolic as the evocation of an idealized countryside or life within it. However, the purity it refers to stems from its poetic baggage. It is this very transgression of idealization that is revealed in these images. (Simultaneously, it ends up corrupting the images themselves). We witness how the landscape transforms, leaving behind the utopian countryside. Yet, it also resists, gradually slipping away from us. Few places are as poetic and personal as the rural landscape.
Bucolic, its definition could be symptomatic for this project. (There are several dualities within it). It could be said that the bucolic lies between the poetic and poetry itself. Simultaneously, the ideal of the countryside also references the life that develops within it. This is why the project has two parts: one focuses on how the countryside is affected by transformation, while the other examines how life within it reacts to this.