‘A long time ago, a man from Sang-Baek-Li, Hap-Cheon, ran off with the dream of studying in Seoul.  But the man who had to return to Sang-Baek-Li and farm because of his father’s opposition sent his first son rather early to Seoul to study.  The man, who planted chestnut trees for his son, and raised black goats for his daughter-in-law, saddened by the son’s failure at college admission, drinks, drives a tractor, and gets into a fatal accident.  What if I could have prevented this family’s misfortune?’
 
The story above, based on a subjunctive starting with ‘what if~,’ is a part of <>, from the <> series of the artist Won Seoung-won.  <>, which is a fantasy about the future, combining the past with the present, is the life story of fairly ordinary people who surround the artist, not the story of a celebrity or a story that catches the public eye.  The heroes are those closely connected in her private network, such as her in-laws, friend’s family, the hierarchy and quarrels among nephews and nieces, class 3 of Goyang Stuido artists, and even homeless puppies.  Their full stories are so-called ‘secrets’ residing in a very deeply private realm of the individual.  The artist reveals these ‘secrets’ as if they were the greatest talk of the town and invites us into them.

The forms preferred in literature for writing about ‘me’ and private matters regarding ‘me’ include autobiography, diary, and letter, and these have been developed and studied in various forms.  The form, which carries out such a function best in visual arts, is nothing but photography.  Everyday with a digital camera, we take pictures of ordinary events surrounding ‘me.’  Family photo albums, travel albums, and numerous snapshots are the archives of memories and records of stories of a private history of family, friends, and love. 
 
Photography, which possesses as an original sin the representation and recording of reality, has expanded its territory through various applications since it was invented in 1839.  However, photographs containing personal memories such as an individual’s family history, love stories, or stories of childhood, which started with the invention of photography, have not been examined in terms of arts.
 
Of course, in the era of post-modernism, where there are no authors, visual arts have become texts for reading rather than mere visual forms and, hence, stories have reemerged.  But this itself was a ‘content’ that was intended to destroy or overturn the ‘form’ pursued by modernist arts.  The stories shown in Won Sung-won’s works, go beyond the role of ‘content’ as a device for the destruction of modernism and take on the form of a secret diary.  In other words, they examine ‘photography’ as an automatic consciousness ‘saving the moment’ that is part of the contemporary life.
 
As mentioned above, this series is based on the past and the present despite the impression given by the title ‘tomorrow.’  The artist personally searches for and collects fragments of the past in order to show the story in one picture.  In spite of the ease of information gathering off the internet, the artist willingly takes the effort to roam the corners of ghettos, photograph abandoned dogs, and visit far away Gangwon-Do in order to photograph a countryside woman preparing lunch and awaiting her husband who went to work.  This effort must be why her works give off the impression of analog even though they are digital photos aided by Photoshop.  In this way, the artist becomes a collector in order to show the stories of the past, the present, and the future in one picture.  As a result, the past, the present, and the future intertwine together to produce images that express various space-times and recompose space.
 
In the subjunctive starting with ‘what if ~’ that starts when one fantasizes away an undesirable reality, nothing is impossible.  One has endless freedom when entering the territory of the subjunctive, like the gap between the third dimension and the fourth dimension.  However, everyone knows it is all delusions and useless fantasies.  Then why are we so easily attracted to such fantasies?  Perhaps it is because we can find refuge in them and dream sweet dreams.
 
The talkative and meddlesome Won Sung-won now comes out of the world with life stories of people around her and asks us: What fantasies do you dream of?

By Ryu Hee-Jung / Curator, Alternative Space Loop




I am a person who enjoys the present to the maximum, buried in memories of the past.
And… the fantasies about people periodically blooming on top of the time of today, I think, are the most future-esque acts that exist within me.
“Tomorrow” is a story of fantasies about neither the past nor the present, but tomorrow.
The heroes of the fantasies are those who exist closest to me.  Family, friends, fellow artists, puppies, and so on.
My head, which could not find specific work to do, naturally falls into fantasies.
Since I am fantasizing alone, nobody would ask for what reason the heroes are in such situations.  But I insist on fantasizing after first figuring out the basis and reasons for such situations.  This is the most troublesome part each time I start a fantasy, but I cannot enjoy a fantasy that is completely groundless.  Perhaps that might be a bit because of the hope that they might happen even once.
 
There are a man and a woman for whom the love of mountains is the only commonality between them after thirty-six years of marriage.  The husband likes Mt. Bukhan, which always stood by his birthplace, and the wife likes Mt. Seorak, which resembles the landscapes she used to paint.
A dissimilar man and woman stand in dissimilar mountains together but differently.  They say: husband and wife look in the same direction and live in parallel instead of facing and clinging to each other.
 
My nieces, whom I meet on big holidays, have an ongoing silent struggle over territory, stemming from their attachment to their possessions.  The little one, like shallow waves crawling through, erodes her big sister’s territory with her pretty face and antics.
 
Abandoned dogs, gathering increasingly in my father’s small backyard, were shivering with an equivocal attitude, neither leaving behind humans nor sticking near them.  When I went to a village somewhat like a ghetto, I witnessed jolly stray dongs visiting one another.  To them humans are necessary beings.  However, the dogs are beings too dignified to be created or abandoned at humans’ whims.  So I pictured a village where jolly and dignified puppies prevail without humans in an environment created by humans.
 
A long time ago, a man from Sang-Baek-Li, Hap-Cheon, ran off with the dream of studying in Seoul.  But the man who had to return to Sang-Baek-Li and farm because of his father’s opposition sent his first son rather early to Seoul to study.  The man, who planted chestnut trees for his son, and raised black goats for his daughter-in-law, saddened by the son’s failure at college admission, drinks, drives a tractor, and gets into a fatal accident.
 And the time goes by…  Sang-Baek-Li is created in the middle of Jong-No-Gu.  Black goats pitch a camp in front of the tractor of the man, who goes to work after lunch, so that the bus may not come any closer.  His wife, who is over seventy years old, smiles at her husband’s back as if commending the black goats.
 
A woman with rosy cheeks like apples and a man who loves smelt fishing got married.  But after the husband went to study abroad, the woman learned of her pregnancy and gave up her studies.  So a daughter was born and grew up pretty with rosy cheeks like Mom’s.  After a while when the father returned, he was unfamiliar to the daughter.  The daughter carefully steps onto the ice, that is, her Dad’s world, unfamiliar but yearned for … in order to find the smelts hidden in herself with red apples.
 
The time of class of Goyang studio has passed.  For a year, artists with marked individualities lived, playing and working together like family, melted and friendly.
We are going separate ways after Open Studio 3, but Open Studio 3 will continue forever in our minds.
 
In this way, there are always people at the center of my fantasies.  The longer and the deeper I know them, the more their everyday lives become embedded in my head as images.  Such images build up to start a fantasy, and the fantasy deepens into a photograph.  They are ordinary yet unique, and splendid yet lonely.  That might be life.  These images are of course compiled entirely as I like, but I was sitting by them all throughout the work process planting symbols in each and every one of them.
 
These fantasies are likely to continue for a rather long time.  For there are so many interesting people bustling around me, and my time spent fantasizing is getting longer in proportion to their number.
 
 By Won, Seoung-won