Digital pigment prints, 2004~2012
Drinking Your Surroundings (2004–2012) and Traveler’s Cup (2012–2017) comprise about fifty digital pigment prints representing the particular places I visited over the past eight years outside of Korea. I have been collecting images of my different surroundings and arranging them, per place, in a glass of water that I drink from every day, in order to absorb that place visually and conceptually. These “portraits” of place convey my thoughts and feelings about the places where I have not constructed an identity and therefore am unable to retrieve spatial memories and stories. The images in Traveler’s Cup were shot on location in order to incorporate a performative approach and a sense of immediacy, whereas my earlier series, Drinking Your Surroundings, was completed in a studio setting. I photographed selected architecture, landmarks, and monuments, printed the images on three-inch-sized paper, cut out the images very carefully, soaked the cut prints in a glass of water, and re-photographed the print-filled glass within the landscape from whence the image’s subject matter came.
