Space of Absence and Presence

Younha Choi

Sun-Min Lee is an artist who speculates both from inside and outside the frame in a healthy and transparent way. Also, she is a wise photographer who chooses a topic that is inside the frame but can be easily sympathized even from the outside the frame. By doing so, she allows herself to tirelessly work on the same topic for a long period of time. Since her method of coming up with a topic is derived from a typical Korean family setting and from conscious and experiences that are feminine, it has a universal characteristic. This characteristic allowed her works to be connected together - from her earlier works such as <The Golden Helmet>, <The Woman's House I, II>, and <Twins> to the current <Dogye Project>. Her work is forming a series of sympathy that allows her work to go ingeniously from one to the next with the same smoothness of turning the pages of a book. With a subject that forms a social sympathy, from the trivial part of women's everyday lives captured in <The Woman's House I> to Korea's patriarchic culture shown in <The Woman's House II>, Lee makes the observers to ask themselves what is power, and what is outside the power or what is inside and outside the frame. Likewise, by closely observing women's role and status in a large family, women's multilayered and multifaceted experiences along with the meaning of a family, or very vivid and insecure problems that exist in women's lives, she has provided many topics for discussions. In Lee's latest work <Dogye Project>, she has intensified the meaning of women and family by using a mining town, a place closest to the modern times, as the setting. She creates a unique photographical grammar by using formal processes (camera format, lighting, framing, continuous and discontinuous dilectic of a person and space) that are stricter than her earlier works, and by reconstructing space and time with added suspense.

Dogye, a place that Lee revisited for the first time in the last 10 years, catches her eyes with the unchanged landscape. As if time has stopped, the streets are exactly as how they used to be. While its neighboring regions such as Taebeak and Jeongseon have transformed themselves into fancy tourist spots, Dogye, with its Kyungdong Mining in the heart of the town, still remains as a place where most of its residents make living by working for the mining industry. Lee presumed that a town that consists of people doing the same work at the same place ought to be full of stories. Just like her presumption Dogye is indeed a very photographical place. It does not only have “the achromatic-colored streets and chilly landscape” with modern Korean historical events melted inside, but it is also a miniature of the modernization wave. In Dogye, the place that closely resembles the modern period, Lee serenely draws out the stories of families shown in the time and space of their everyday lives. She closely observes many people and places of Dogye that varies from the scene of a cozy room of an old couple who have shared the bittersweet memories of living together for 40 years, to the scene of families who climb up to their ancestral graves on top of the mountain with a basket full of food, and to the scene of the couple holding each other's aching bodies while standing on the rail tracks beside their house before the camera. In particular, similar to her earlier work, <Inside the Fence>, she constructs the status of women with preciseness. For example, she gives the center of the picture to the old women who couldn't help but to live a long life as an extra, and to the women with a miner husband and son, she gives a place for her to look far out to the eastern sky. Also, the daughter-in-law whose job was to do all the chores around the house stares straight ahead as a subject who makes her voice to be heard. Lee sufficiently describes the situation of her subjects with minimum directing.

“The narrative of the lights”, that freely makes stories in a frame, should be given extra attention when looking at <Dogye Project>. Lee's light flows freely between its subjects while moving dynamically as the original diffused light (natural light) and the strong artificial light coming from back of the camera meet. Moreover, these lights intensify the quality of time and space and expand their meanings by subtly discovering all aspects of the subjects. Lee shows “the introspection of photography” with the head of the family placed in the center of the brightest section of the photo or the whole photo, or with inclusion of death by separating the world with life from the place of death and fossilizing it, as shown in the scene of the descendents walking farther away from the grave. Furthermore, Lee reveals the reality of absence and existence, the essence of photography, and arouses the meaning of family with the scene of a woman who is standing firmly with a cane beside her dead husband's grave shown in the center of the frame. In Lee's photos, the people who are gathered for the occasion of a holiday create new relationships by accepting each other but giving a little twist, looking unfamiliar and heterogeneous at times but showing a warm nostalgia through many poses.

Dogye is like a place that Marshall Berman once described as a place from the modern times that “dangerously lack depth and sort of like a stage equipment”. I can clearly imagine the photographer “setting the camera and the lights in front of the coal plant in drizzling rain bearing through the chilly air.” The photographer promised herself to do “ten years of work”. Proceeding the photo shoots with a big-sized camera meant that most of the work had to be done by hand just like sewing one stitch at a time, however, she fulfilled her promise into finishing this work, and, for that, I give her my applause. <Dogye Project> that was started with the question “what is a family?” allows the viewers to look back to their own family and sympathize, because there is an introspection of the everyday life in her works. Likewise, there is an amazing healthy beauty in her works in the way Lee draws out a piece of art from the life that she has seen, is presently seeing, and is living though. Making a living, introspecting, and creating a sustainable place for communication with photography is what makes Sun-Min Lee's vision and strength.