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15/10/2008

Kyungwoo Chun

Fifty One Fine Art Photography, Antwerp

Fifty One Fine Art Photography is proud to present the new soloshow of photographer Kyungwoo Chun, titled Thousands. The story of Thousands is as simple as it is complex: the Korean photographer Kyungwoo Chun (°1969) searches in this project for his namesakes ‘Chun’ (or ‘thousand’ in English). This name seems to originate from China, from where one of his ancestors emigrated to Korea about four centuries or sixteen generations ago and settled there.

In 2006, photographer Kyungwoo Chun finds himself, during his search, in an agglomeration of little villages in the Chinese province of Henan where almost everybody in and around it is named Chun. Between 2006 and 2007, he succeeds in making thousand small portraits of a thousand different people wearing his name.

These are the portraits exhibited in this exhibition. It was Chun’s intention to capture the image of each of these thousand persons for a minute long, so that each motion and the passing of each minute would become visible in the more or less blurred portraits. One thousand minutes in the life of this village captured in one thousand faces. The portraits do not show any precise details, but are concentrated on the essentials, so that we see the figures as people, without any reproduction of status or power. Chun readjusted the strict concept, putting it back into everyday life by adding the personal data of the persons on the photographs. Conceptual art and fieldresearch, a systematic approach and an abundance of life, unity and diversity: Chun succeeds in linking extreme opposites in an amazingly precise way.

A journey and a circulation through faces and history, a continuity of time, an action in the blink of an eye: all of this in a visual history of Kyungwoo Chun. “Believing is seeing,” Chun himself wrote.

Chun graduated from Chun-Ang University’s School of Fine Arts in Seoul, Korea. He is actually living in Germany where he graduated from the University of Wuppertal in Communication Design (Photography). The last few years, his work has been shown in a number of gallery and museum shows in The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Spain, etc. He also received some important grants and awards, like the Grant from the Art Council Korea in 2008 and the Hamni Photography Award (Hamni Foundation for Arts and Culture, Korea) in 2007, which are the most recent.

Opening Thursday October 16th from 18.00h – 21.00h.

Fifty One Fine Art Photography
Zirkstraat 20 - Antwerpen

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