moom bookshop

Between Seeing and Being Seen

Kwak Beom Seok has been taking portraits of Fai, a migrant worker from Bangkok, for over five years. He said he was curious about her daily life when he saw her working on a farm in Korea. She has been moving around Gyeongsang Province partaking in different sorts of jobs in a strawberry farm and a bamboo salt factory to name a few. On her days off, she shops at the market, hangs out with friends, goes to karaoke, and puts on nail polish, living a life like any other 20-something.

What stands out in Kwak’s photographs is the way he utilizes a “gaze”. He shows both a gaze into Fai upon showing her life and her gaze at things, allowing for a critical distance from the image to viewers of photographs.

The way a person is “seen” in a photograph often depends on the gaze of the “viewer” or, more precisely, the “photographer” and the relationship between “a viewer” and “the viewed”. People in the photos – anthropometric photos of Koreans taken by Japanese anthropologist Ryuzo Torii at the behest of the Korean Governor General during the Japanese occupation, and photographs of Germans by August Sander who aimed to convey the truth of the times – are “data” for statistics or empirical evidence and the photographer becomes an “observer”. In this process, the gazer and the gazed are divided into those who have the power and authority to gaze from top down and those under the power with a camera in between. Photographer Jeon Mong Gag shows in Yunmi’s Album, photographs taken over a period of 26 years, the birth of his daughter to her marriage. The fact that he captured the birth and growth of a person over such a long period of time naturally leads one to expect documentary photography, but in fact, his photographs evoke paternal love for his daughter and family rather than serving as a parenting diary or an archive on child raising. This comes from the physical and emotional distance between the photographer and people in his photographical works.

Kwak looked into the sea in his previous Night Sea series, and he stepped back and photographed the sea from a distance to show how it changes with the wind (East Wind series). Although he distinguished his works according to their distance from the sea, the two series can be under the same theme in that the same subject was photographed from different distances.

In relation to his previous work on “sea,” he seems to have boldly experimented with a gaze in Fai. First, the viewpoint and distance from which he looks at his subjects have become more diverse. On his previous series, he said that his photographic works “capture what comes to his view by chance from his experience with an object rather than trying to get some meaning out of it.” However, in the case of Fai, the object is a “person” with whom he interacts, so the experience with the object is variable and almost unpredictable. This also affects the gaze in the photographs, making “Fai” both the object of Kwak’s observation and the subject that does the act of gazing. If the direction of a gaze and the distance between the viewer and the viewed are the starting point of critique, the question of “Who gaze is at play?” in photographs that do not feature Fai, showing her daily life and the space she lives in would also be important. In the photographs of her everyday life, Kwak’s gaze and Fai’s gaze are mixed, leading us to question whether the photographer intentionally showed both gazes, and whether the photographer disguised his gaze as Fai’s. However, by including the photographs that Fai took, we can infer that the two gazes are a result of her becoming the subject of the gaze. Here, viewers see through her eyes, and thus view banalities in a new angle.

“The meaning of ‘looking’ is to reveal the existence of objects,” writes Kaja Silverman in his philosophical treatise titled “World Spectators.” Looking emphasizes what is visual, meaning “coming into view” or “to be seen”, and this act of “revealing” is “a fundamental characteristic of being” itself. As appearance is related to being, it is important to see properly as a subject of seeing things, and “In order to release a creation or object into its being, we must understand it through the diversity of perspectives.” That is why Kwak Beom Seok states through his Fai series that the act of “seeing” is not to consume images in a one-sided gaze, but to respond to the revelation of existence.

• Kaja Silverman’s views are quoted from “Viewing for the Sake of Viewing”, a chapter from World Spectators by Kaja Silverman, translated by Youngbaek Jeon and the Society of the Contemporary Art, published by Yekyong, 2010, pp. 8-42.