Sojin Chun | Photographs
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ReMaking KM6
The photographs in Re-Making KM6 illustrate my journey home to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, for the first time in 17 years. When I left Bolivia, I was thirteen years old. The five glorious years that I spent in Santa Cruz had marked my cultural identity in a significant way. Perhaps my deep affection for Bolivia was circumstantial, I left a tropical childhood paradise to encounter the dead cold winter of Canada. My memories of my former home include sunshine playing with my friends in the nearby jungle and falling asleep to the sounds of wild monkeys. For me, this trip was necessary to encounter my past as an adult and to experience the realities of a city loaded with political and social implications much different from my present home in Toronto.
My return to Santa Cruz was an important personal journey to discover a part of my cultural hybridity. I was born in Seoul, Korea; grew up in Bolivia; and moved to Canada as a teenager. My hybrid identity and my social position returning home as an artist, a researcher, a former resident, a foreigner, between an outsider and an insider complicates the way in which the photographs presented are read. The images also take on different meanings depending on the context in which they are shown. When an installation of this work was shown in Bolivia, the audience identified with the people and the places in the photographs. This body of work became a portrayal of “home” for the viewers. Upon return to Canada, I must contextualize the place where the photographs were taken as well as the people in the portraits in relation to my own personal narrative, which informs a larger social context of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia.
PoMo Sapien
POst MOdern Homo SAPIEN
Post-Modernity is characterized by the death of ideology. Post-modern times have proven to be highly contradictory. Man can access space and land on the moon while millions starve right here on earth. During modernity, the exchange of information gave individuals the sense that they could affect politics and could change the world. However, recently and historically, revolutions have proven to be futile in the face of bureaucratic governments and domineering world superpowers. Today’s PoMo Sapien is in constant doubt and cynicism. We have access to more information than ever before. However, we have learnt to doubt this information since we are aware that the media is manipulated. Our perception of reality has blurred. There is no absolute certainty in our world. Since social norms are put to constant questioning, we can no longer believe or trust the world around us. Some PoMo Sapiens are only motivated by money since his/her survival depends on it. In a capitalist system, only materially can we reassure ourselves that we exist. Our bodies have become objects of desire, an object that others will look at to determine your social status. Our bodies have become commodities. Objects to be displayed & sold. Recognizing the psychological effects of our capitalist surroundings will also lead to the search for a further spiritual truth.
Through the photographs in this collection, I attempt to discover and reveal the innermost human condition as affected by our outside environment. The images represented in this series have an element of theater and mystery. Most of the subjects in the photographs do not make eye contact with the camera. They have obviously been posed, yet the expressions on their faces tell the contrary. The location is ambiguous, unknown and non-recognizable. I chose to shoot in natural settings (bathrooms, bedrooms, living rooms, streets, backyards, etc.) instead of shooting in a studio, as our surroundings are sets not different from a movie or photography set. I intent to convey the idea that places only exist in our heads with our conditioned knowledge about the world. Places are not special on their own. Places become special when we give them labels and attach romantic stigma to them. Our homes and our physical surrounding are sets we have created for ourselves. A set in which we must obey the rules and regulations meaningful only in context of its surroundings and culture. Once I have recognized that the world is a set, I realized that I am also a part of this set. One the other hand, understanding the constructed nature of our surrounding allows us to seat back and re-examine our motivations as well as our place as a human race on earth. Under close examination, we also understand the momentary beauty that we find in our mundane daily lives and how the irony of our existence creates conflict, beauty, tragedy as well as comedy.
