FRINGE PHOTO FESTIVAL

2025 PORTFOLIO REVIEW

ENCOUNTER VIII
: The Time of Dry Eyes

Photography emerges from a lingering gaze and the weight of time dwelling within it. To see is to inhabit the other's temporality, and through sustained looking, the act of seeing transcends visual perception, expanding into a mode of contact and connection with the subject. In this exhibition, "dry eyes" does not signify the absence of feeling, but stands as a metaphor for time itself—the trace left by looking so long that even the eyes have dried.

This exhibition traces the paths of vision shaped over time by four artists selected from the 2024 Portfolio Review of the Daegu Photo Biennale: Seong-youn KOO, Hyun-min RYU, Ok-hyun AHN, and Soen LEE. Each artist, in their own way, observes the world, arranges perception into form, and transforms the act of seeing into a way of being in relation. Their "dry eyes" create landscapes formed through layers of time, emotion, and encounter—where gaze shifts from seeing to sensing. While their approaches to what photography observes and how it connects differ, they converge upon a shared question: What compels us to gaze so long, and ultimately, to make contact? This exhibition pauses before this question, exploring how a gaze can both persist and expand.

Seong-youn KOO’s Un-vanishing invites a subversive reflection on the ontological position of objects through the unlikely pairing of garbage and orchids. The work begins by engaging with "useless" objects—discarded plastics. The artist looks again at things that have lost their function and place in everyday life, collects them, and transmutes them into new symbols: orchids. Here, collecting becomes an act of sustained attention outside established systems of value, while "renaming" is both an artistic gesture that assigns new meaning and a quiet expression of care. In her Rock series, where small stones are rendered as mountains, she reveals a geological temporality in which rocks become sand and "sand becomes rock." Through this deep time, social distinctions about the usefulness of existence dissolve. The artist gently disturbs these inherited hierarchies, sensitively calling forth the latent potential each object holds.

Ok-hyun AHN's Woman and Man Lead Each Other to Divinity composed of video and photographic series, turns away from love as emotion and instead examines the social scripts through which love is staged and restaged, its theatricality. The artist's work becomes a stage where opposing affects, desire and loss, praise and self-loathing, youth and aging, tangle and clash. In this structure, where life and art draw boundaries only to transgress them again, love emerges as both noble and worn, a yearning for beauty and a quiet endurance of not quite reaching it. By juxtaposing classical opera with real-life episodes, the artist lays bare how love has been endlessly recycled as cliché, replaying its explosive ruptures under the looming promise of tragedy.

Initiated by familial love, Hyun-min RYU's KIM Sae-hyun project and RYU Sang-rak project reveal a form of affection that deepens through the distance created when private relationships are translated into artistic language. Blending documentary, staging, and conceptual approaches, his photographs shift continuously, refusing to settle into a single emotion. Rather than completing a narrative, RYU creates open structures where images produced through different methods interlock, inviting viewers to construct meaning on their own. His nephew, Kim Sae-hyun, appears both as a subject of affection and as an other who evokes a meditation on distance. The gaze directed at him naturally turns toward the artist's father, Ryu Sang-rak. Within the genre of family photography, RYU embraces his role as an artist—not to control the relationship but to trace it, allowing the gaze to tremble and interpretation to remain open.

Through Drift Bottle, which began by following missing person posters encountered on the street, and its extension A Long Walk, Soen LEE unravels emotional responses to pain and loss through the form of drifting. The artist follows traces without reaching the center, moving along the edges with the sensation of circling both others and himself. While the family history surrounding a minority religion remains unseen in the images, the distance he deliberately preserves by deferring confrontation renders sensations like desperate attachment, anxiety, and fear all the more vividly. What he captures is not the event itself but the lingering reverberations of time and emotion that once enclosed him. The hesitations inscribed in each chapter become his way of staying with others' pain and his own emotions, and the path he traces ultimately turns inward, leading quietly back to her own family.

This exhibition traces the gazes and time of artists who sought to touch their subjects through sustained looking, exploring how the act of seeing can lead to forming relationships with others. Photography extends beyond capturing moments to become a temporal device that allows one to dwell with the subject for prolonged periods, thus expanding into a site of relational thinking. Images that hold this time invite viewers' gazes to linger, and the act of looking at the works opens yet another possibility for contact. The viewer, by completing this flow, becomes the force that realizes relational openness. Under today's shared imperative of "living together," this exhibition proposes attentiveness and gazing toward the other as an ethos of relating that we must sustain.