Kyu Sang Lee

Stop Stop Click
01 March - 30 March 2018
Eclectica Contemporary, Cape Town.

A key question hitting the art world and specifically contemporary photographers is the question of the future of the image. To stop, to pause, to click manifests in everyday life across so many platforms and interactions. To take seriously the art of photography, does this mean a forfeiting of chance? Of the momentary and immediate? Or does it simply mean a reconsidering of interaction and a reframing of approach to image-making?

The danger within all of this is to not move so far beyond what is accessible – to make work that pushes limits and challenges the viewer without alienating them. The artists featured in this group exhibition each pause on the idea of making and taking and present work that offers a fresh new realm of possibility within their medium.

Kyu Sang Lee, whose mysterious black and white imagery test our boundaries of understanding, assumption and trust in photography beguiles the viewer with his subtle and impactful images. Playing with scale and perspective – both in the images themselves and in their presentation, Lee’s work offers a playful and somewhat sinister example of photography as an experimental art form. Mia Thom, a recent Michaelis graduate has pushed the boundaries of photography beyond and around the darkroom – using space as a springboard into sonic possibilities and performance. Thom’s visual work illuminates the liminal space of analog processes, toying with use of instrument or mechanism in two-dimensional space.

Justin Dingwall, known to many as a prolific and skilled image maker and portrait taker, offers up his hyperreal surreal images that toy with gravity, light and colour. His work captures symbolism and discourse in the present, activating the magic of photographic media and combining his narrative to form new and evolving eventualities. Morgan Kundhardt’s twin existence between herself and her twin sister has informed much of her process. By cutting and splicing images and photographs, Kundhardt explores in images what her twin sister offers in writing, overlapping and blurring between creative processes. The sculptural imagery of Biance Bell flips perspective and shifts our understanding of imagery. Bell extends what was previously confined to two dimensional surfaces, pulling our eye forwards and back along focal planes and cleverly expanding perspectives in Perspex.

The participating artists exhibit an ability to curiously interrogate the myth of photography, this modern alchemy of creation that often polarizes and exposes. The exhibition hopes to open up new possibilities and actions – a space for thinking, viewing and feeling art created within the photographic medium.

Kyu Sang Lee’s photographic artistic practice draws on his experience within distinct regions and cultures of the world. Born in Seoul, Korea in 1993 and having moved to Cape Town in 2005, his artistic practice exhibits strong influences of Eastern, Western and African cultures. Working in predominantly black and white photography, presents an interesting juxtaposition to ideas of the “lost” and are driven by the concept of time and fate. Interlocking these notions with photography, he focuses on constructing the realm of the metaphysical, the spiritual and the surreal.

As an art student, Kyu Sang Lee was awarded the Simon Gerson Prize in 2016 for his graduating body of work and previously had been awarded the Cecil Skotnes Award for Most Promising Artist, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town in 2014. After graduating from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2016, Lee won the Celeste Prize for Photography & Digital Graphics in 2017. Lee has exhibited with Eclectica on numerous occasions and has exhibited both locally and internationally. – Clare Patrick