Works by 12 Photographers at the Korean Cultural Center

The Korean Cultural Center's exhibition ‘Insights into Nature and Humanity’ provides a comprehensive overview of Korean contemporary photography. The selection of more than 100 images, on display from Tuesday until June 30 as part of the Budapest Photo Festival, spans the past 40 years of South Korean photography through the personal journeys of twelve well-known Korean artists.

The exhibiting artists belong to different generations and are concerned with different themes, but the selection provides a thorough overview of the development of Korean photography and the factors that have shaped Korean society and culture, the Korean Cultural Center told MTI.

Bohnchang Koo captures the last breaths of a decade, Jihyun Jung, who himself grew up in a prefab housing environment, documents the disappearing and renewing urban spaces, Seunggu Kim shows the specific lifestyles and social trends of Koreans, while Sunmin Lee focuses on the position of women within the family and the social discourse on women.

Jeongmee Yoon explores the relationship between gender and consumerism. Area Park uses paintings to recall the real and pseudo memories of her mother, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

Byunghun Min is a representative figure of his generation who has been working with monochrome, pure photography for forty years. In the images on view in the exhibition, suburban plots of land that have been bulldozed rise to the ontological plane.

Lee Jeonglok’s digital compositions, which seek to make the mythical world visible, are ritualistic and performance-like. Hyunggeun Park's contemplative paintings reflect on the problem of time and meaning.

Heinkuhn Oh’s famous Adjumma series is a portrait of married, middle-aged Korean women. Sooncheol Byun photographs the contestants of Korea's longest-running music talent television show, and Sungpil Han is obsessed with the borderlands of digitalization, photography and painting.

As the organisers point out, the exhibition, which covers the last 40 years of South Korean photography, is the first in Europe to be shown in Hungary. It is open to the public free of charge.

The exhibition is accompanied by a roundtable discussion with the exhibiting artists on Tuesday evening at the Korean Cultural Center and a studio workshop with Jeonglok Lee on Thursday at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, where visitors will be able to learn about light as a formal language through practical exercises.