Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
In these days when majority of people take comfort in digital space - including virtual space such as SNS and various games - I open up the work by asking acquaintances about their "safe haven." Me and my acquaintance go to the place together to take a single picture with a large format camera. It is distinctive process from digital images which creates numerous meaningless image files and it’s my arbitrary strategy to take honest reality. To capture a single best moment with film, we wait and do our own best. The passing time does not give a chance to correct it, so I thought it could be also a great metaphor for trying to do one's best in the given situation and time. Furthermore, it is meaningful for me to store physical space in tangible film and paper instead of image files that are easily lost and forgotten.
I find acquaintances who are inconsistent between the region of birth and the region of their current residence, Seoul. I record their portrait interacting with their own resting places in Seoul. People constantly move into different spaces for a better future, but as the word Utopia does not exist, the concept of ideal places easily destroyed like a sand castle. But they continuously find or create their own space to protect themselves in a harsh reality. In that sense, their resting place has a similar structure to the attic built on sand castles. I've moved such heterotopia to a plane.
The title of the series, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, came from a song of the same title of Elton John. We don’t have to be a king of pop or have a farm to go back or go to rehab to sympathize with this song. Simple yet powerful lyrics easily capture the hearts of incredibly big audience from diverse age, race, sex. I think this is one of the most successful example of universalization of private experience. We all have experience of being strangers somewhere. I put the title of the series in the sense of universalizing such personal feelings.
I find acquaintances who are inconsistent between the region of birth and the region of their current residence, Seoul. I record their portrait interacting with their own resting places in Seoul. People constantly move into different spaces for a better future, but as the word Utopia does not exist, the concept of ideal places easily destroyed like a sand castle. But they continuously find or create their own space to protect themselves in a harsh reality. In that sense, their resting place has a similar structure to the attic built on sand castles. I've moved such heterotopia to a plane.
The title of the series, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, came from a song of the same title of Elton John. We don’t have to be a king of pop or have a farm to go back or go to rehab to sympathize with this song. Simple yet powerful lyrics easily capture the hearts of incredibly big audience from diverse age, race, sex. I think this is one of the most successful example of universalization of private experience. We all have experience of being strangers somewhere. I put the title of the series in the sense of universalizing such personal feelings.