Pantoms

2017-2024 Artist statment Phantoms Looking back, I think my place of work has always been a tourist destination since I started taking pictures. What made me take pictures of tourist attractions? Perhaps the act of taking pictures with a camera in a tourist destination is natural, so people have less resistance and there are many wonderful things to see. But above all, it was good to be able to capture various aspects of people, and I liked the picture of people in it. People always looked excited and happy at the tourist attractions. But at some point something in the tourist attraction made me uncomfortable. People are playing in the huge palm of modern consumption capital, just as Son Goku plays in the palm of Buddha. As many scholars argue, modern capital goes beyond labor exploitation, encouraging excessive consumption and forcing leisure. The public thinks they consume themselves and enjoy leisure, but in fact, consumption is indiscriminately encouraged by the temptation of all kinds of advertisements and media, and leisure activities are also manipulated by the invisible compulsion of capital, not by individual free choice. Therefore, the consumption and leisure of modern people are always insufficient and give rise to empty thirst. I think what made me think this was the opportunity of the Haeundae White Sand Expansion Project, which I saw while working on my previous work, Haeundae. The Haeundae White Sand Expansion Project was a construction to increase the width of the white sand beach, which was reduced to 35 meters, to 70 meters and create an underwater breakwater to prevent sand loss. In 2014 and 2015, the width of Haeundae Beach's white sand beach doubled due to the expansion of the white sand beach, but on the other hand, a high-rise building with more than 100 floors was being built. It was overshadowed by the criticism that turbulence caused by reckless construction of high-rise buildings is one of the causes of sand loss. Haeundae is a representative place of forced leisure created by the Hyundai Consumer Agency. The expansion of the sandy beach and the construction of high-rise buildings are only bait and temptation of modern capitalism. People constantly take self-pictures of their phones at tourist attractions and post them on SNS to check their presence and enjoy them for a while, but their gestures, which are not fixed even one-eighth of my camera, stop for a while like a ghost, and then leave for a new hot place. in pursuit of a desire for capital and a sense of non-substance that is by no means his own. Gamcheon Culture Village, Songdo Beach, Gyeongju, and Ulsan are no different. People who have been pushed from everywhere just stop for a while and then spread out somewhere else.