Seok-Woo Song: Wandering, Wondering
Born in 1993, Seoul, South Korea.
06.10.2020
No one has ever forced or suppressed our lives. I live in the naturalness of a certain flow of time, a life that has already been adapted to a familiar flow. – Seok-woo Song
Wandering, Wondering (2020) by rising artist Seok-Woo Song is a portrayal of the aimlessness of adulthood. Deliberately hiding or obscuring his subjects’ faces or dwarfing them with enormous terrain and monotonous concrete structures, Song’s use of distance and body language cements this unrequited need for acknowledgement as explicit text. Human figures disappear into the scenery as near-identical props, each robbed of their individuality. The trauma that many young adults are exposed to during their societal debuts veils the photographs in dense loneliness. The result is a study of the kinds of people such rapidly changing social structures produce; wandering bodies, made alien and insignificant by virtue of the pre-existing societal script.
Holding an M.F.A from Department of Photographic Design in Hongik University graduate School of Industrial Arts and an M.F.A from Department of Fine Arts, Korea National University of Arts, Seok-Woo Song’s work has been exhibited in Seoul including Artbit Gallery, Palais de Séoul and Seojin Artspace, and he has received 18th Photography Criticism Awards(2021), has been selected as the best artist in the ‘BELT’-photography category(2021), among others.