Kyungwoo Chun

Underlying the photographs and video performances of Kyungwoo Chun, a native of Seoul born in 1969, is very often the phenomenon of time and the various ways in which we apprehend it. Time, for the artist, is “what we as individuals actually live.” Chun’s exceptionally intense portraits, some of which took several hours to expose, are neither character studies, nor do they seek to “portray” in the conventional sense of the word. What rather happens is that the photographer and his subjects enter into a dialogue which, as Stephan Berg has observed, culminates in a picture “in which not only the photographer himself and the person photographed, but also the time they have spent together are superimposed.”