Seung Woo Back
Wednesday, 23 September 2009
“In 2002, when Seung Woo Back visited North Korea for the first time, he took snap shots of the city of Pyongyang while under the surveillance and control of the accompanying guards. He was only able to shoot limited areas, and even had his films censored, but the camera had captured parts that even the artist and the North Korean security agents had failed to see… [During his visit], he heard the North Korean children repeating three same things: “We welcome your visit to the Democratic People’s Republic of Joseon”, “We are happy”, and “Only we can defeat the Americans”. But what was being trained and controlled were not only the children of North Korea. The promotional photos made by North Korea in the 1970’s that the artist stumbled on in a small bookstore in Tokyo were also politically controlled and artificially manipulated. Just as original copies do not exist in photography, Seung Woo Back shows… our attempts to attain, by means of transforming and manipulating, our utopian illusions… [He] mocks at the utopian illusions that society has created by adding photographic manipulations to the images he shot in the controlled society of North Korea.”
Text and images sourced from a39c2.