Tourist by Hong, Sung-Do

 Hong, Sung-Do uses photography as a main medium of his work, but he distinctively adds 'sculptural dimension' into it. It is noticeable that he makes a reader of the photograph not a passive interpreter of the mere 'record of a subject.' but a dynamic 're-inventor' of the photograph'.

 'Tourist' series in this exhibition are composed of the photographs he took during his trips in Nepal, france, Italy and so on. Sometimes they include common fashion shops or a motor showroom which seem distant from a particularly exotic appeal. They just look like snap shots of the places which he unintentionally took photographs of. However, paying attention to the transformation that the artist adds to these photographs. We come to realize these are not simply the exotic landscape pictures of tourists. The reason is that there is a device to after the experience of both 'seeing situation' and 'seen contents' simultaneously. The technical structure of the device can en explained as follows: The artist photographs the specific places such as a crowed street, and then the same places again after a while. Then he cuts the areas with differences in the second photograph and collages them onto the same areas in the first photograph. However these collages are not affixed minutely and neatly. They are rather cut in pieces, crumpled and fixed with a rivet which reinforces the process of three-dimensional collage.

 Here a temporal space or a point of time performs the drastic leap. This leap is the one that happens among the different tomes on these compound photographs. The radical severance and at the same time the vibrant movement between the two times. This compound nature and the severance incite the confusion with the unity of our gazes at the landscape in the photographs into the experience of 'the time of existence' which newly occurs from 'the chock' between the photograph and the subject. That is the dynamic, existent time between the subject and the photograph which possesses the compound point of two different times.

 In this meaning the activity of 'Tour' is not completed and commemorated int the landscape of the past in the photographs, and in fact this is the ' additional tour-activity' that the audience who looks at these photographs deliberately re-creates. This tour becomes the work that invents the time, and reversely the meaning of such time does not have any other meaning than the reckless invention and creation. As Bergson says, "Time is no more than a simple 'Invention'".