Voyeur Inbetween: Soyoung Park
평탄선과 무대(Flat line and Stage) explores how vision opens at the moment a subject observes. It studies both the structure of sight and the architectural spaces that provoke it. Through photography, the work presents a new formal idea.
The shapes that appear in a moment are forms that can open. They hold the possibility of opening, creating new visual stimuli and exploring perception.
The line of closed eyes is a boundary between opposites such as light and dark, known and unknown. This horizontal line becomes a stage, changing the idea of seeing. Seeing with closed eyes, seeing in darkness, and the continuous boundary line mark where vision seems to begin and end. It signifies a space between reality and imagination, blurring the line between the visible world and the internal realm.
The hidden vision suggests that what is closed may imply opening, and what is open may imply closing. The moment of change lies along the line of closed eyes. Here, the eye is not just an organ but a contained form, a device for perception.
Working on 평탄선과 무대(Flat line and Stage), suggests an alternative stage. If the line of closed eyes suggests a horizontal stage, there is also a stage created when a subject faces something else. This raises questions about subject and object, who looks at whom, and about the difference between simply seeing and intentionally looking. In a flat composition, the vertical dividing line becomes a vertical stage, raising issues of which side functions as the stage and how looking and reflection interact.
The work also studies how spatial structures, such as walls or corners, shape the act of seeing. Seeing creates a specific angle of vision. A subject’s gaze is reflected and always returns to the subject.
The black void represents seeing in the dark and seeing the darkness itself. Seeing is usually linked to light. Yet we can think about inner vision, about what one sees in darkness. We can also treat darkness as an object, as a mass to look at. What is the black void? It may be the unknown. Even so, we can sense that this unknown exists.
When something opens, the process always contains a certain form, like a half open door, suggesting an ongoing state and an in between shape. The objects and spaces we look at awaken our desire to see. Our gaze reflects off their surfaces and returns to us. A photograph taken through a camera lens is also a result of this reflection. What I see comes back to me as an image.
The question is how my gaze is interpreted through the camera and the scene, and how this process of reflection is transformed into the medium of photography.