[SOLD OUT!] KID NOSTALGIA: PORTRAITS OF SOUTH KOREAN YOUTH
[SOLD OUT!]
Title: Kid Nostalgia: Portraits of South Korean Youth
Photographer: Park Sung Jin
Publisher: propaganda press
Size: 234*286 mm
Binding: Hardcover
Pages: 112
PARK SUNG JIN’S KID NOSTALGIA: PORTRAITS OF SOUTH KOREAN YOUTH is now available!
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http://lightbox.time.com/2014/07/22/recklessness-and-rebellion-meet-the-cool-kids-of-south-korea/
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The kids I saw in their uniforms belonged to the school system and protected by it, yet they also looked like they wanted to get away from it. There was a certain antisocial energy in their look and attitude, but what I wanted to do was capture their charisma—something you can’t manufacture.
The models I photographed might not be A-student types, devoted to their studies and obeying all the rules. These kids look like the ones who are on the outside of Korea’s battlefield of competition—whether it’s by their own choice or for whatever reason. But this has nothing to do with my vision of the kids. I had found something rather pure and naïve in their rebelliousness and immaturity. The way they reveal themselves as they roam around the periphery of the school system is so raw that there’s an ironic beauty to it. There’s a sort of imperfect freedom and recklessness to their rebellion and sadness, to their style that the older generation refuses to tolerate. That beauty is something I sensed not in the majority of kids who are focused on school and their private academies, but in the ones who loiter around the back alleys and vacant lots.
These kids are not so-called “sophisticated” or “chic” that many people in this society want to be associated with. These kids are raw and fresh. And I really felt connected to this. At that time, these kids were the only things that seemed exciting and alive in this city. Everything else seemed boring and dull. It seemed as if they were the only things that were allowed to be exciting and alive. The city just seemed so grey to me.
I was born in Seoul and moved to New York in 1987. It happened when I was seventeen years old. I spent my late teens and all of twenties in New York. One of the most interesting things about the city is that it’s a place where people from every conceivable race live side by side, but they don’t actually mix—the whites, the blacks, the Europeans, the Hispanics. Instead, they live within their own identities.
While I was doing this project, I often thought that I was, in a sense, trying to find my own forgotten roots. It wasn’t so much about finding an “answer”. Better to say it was a way of responding to the questions that kept sprouting up within my mind from one moment to the next. The work may seem like a kind of archive, but that wasn’t my motivation. I think it would’ve been boring and dreary if that had actually been
my goal.
The photos you take are a self-portrait of yourself, not others. Whatever or whoever that is in the picture is a portrait of the one who takes it. These faces were perhaps my own face I wanted to keep from conforming to the gloomy city.
BY Park Sung Jin
Park Sungjin was born 1970 in Seoul, South Korea and moved to NYC in 1987. He has received BFA in 1995 and MFA in 2010 from Pratt Institute. Since his show in 2 × 13 gallery in NYC, he has shown his works in the US,
England and Korea. It was at the A + C Festival of Emerging Photographers in 2005 that he first showed his Kid Nostalgia series in the United States. He was awarded 1st prize at the Photographic Center Northwest competition Up & Now in 2007 juried by Charlotte Cotton, former curator at LACMA and Victoria and Albert Museum. He has also participated in the Youth Code! exhibition curated by Nathalie Herschdorfer at 2012 Daegu Photo Biennale in Korea. He now lives in
New York and Seoul.