Like most of the images we see today—a time when the things we record and store are converted for use in digital devices and are transmitted and circulated on digital screens and platforms—the photographs of AN Chorong begin from data. But the aim of her work is not a critical contemplation of the nature of the digitalized images. As if out of habit, she constantly photographs her surroundings, transferring them to hard disk, categorizing them by loose groupings, and storing them as data.1) The interesting element here is how, as she actively entrusts her data to mechanisms of endless replication and reproduction, she also awaits their interpretation and expansion into new contexts as a kind of potentiality. Rather than focusing on the recorded image as her own personal recollection of a specific time or place, she can be seen approaching it as something that actively interacts with external contexts and others—harboring its own “desires,” as it were. This encourages an examination of her work in terms of what W. J. T. Mitchell describes as the agency of the image.2) Rather than repositories of fixed meaning, the images that AN Chorong produces are dynamic phenomena that start in a broader context of history, society, and culture and are redefined and come alive at the smaller level of personal experience and memory. Instead of asking the viewer to passively approach the recorded moments where she has been present, she seeks a shared psychological response based on the simulation of individual memories, experiences, and emotions.3)

Within their artistic concreteness, AN Chorong’s photographs are transformed into a language of more proactive response. The strategy of materialized images that she adopts is diametrically opposed to the flat, sleek surfaces of digital images and the way that consumer culture approaches images as a language of surfaces and skins. Given photographic art’s origins as a medium based on printing, this material realm may not seem entirely new, but AN refers to and appropriates multiple dimensions and contexts for her photography’s support structures. She may ruminate on a present built upon a nonlinear past as she deviates from linear time with the presentation of a friend’s postcard image together with a photograph taken long before showing that friend’s everyday life (Night Turns to Day, 2019, Art Sonje Center, Seoul). She may explore an approach of using a cell phone case as a photographic frame, so that her photograph comes to reside in another person’s daily life (AN CHORONG PLUS, 2023, Dapalm, Seoul). As her images become one with cell phone accessories, she even encourages a reconsideration of the existential standing that arises from photography’s place as a universal cultural act, by having the photographs printed so that they are included in a case within a selfie—thus extending them beyond the way in which photographs typically exist. This recalls the idea of democratization of the image and a contemporary reality where photographs—once monopolized and controlled by a minority—have now become something that anyone can take, edit, and circulate. In this way, they evoke associations with a redefinition of the social, cultural, and political hierarchies surrounding the image and an order in which different voices and experiences coexist. AN Chorong’s photographic approach of using support structures as a way of drawing the image into material realms is carried on in the exhibition Flesh (2024, Primary Practice, Seoul). By having her photographs placed onto and inside a structure resembling a four-person table that has been laid on its back, the artist conjures associations with the photographic image as something wedged in between an everyday dining table surface and glass. This draws the viewer’s attention to a more private realm than would an approach emphasizing the properties of the photograph and the remembering of specific past experiences. The ways of being that are adopted by photography in the context of personal habits and behaviors translate into photographs that are rolled up and faced in clear glass cups (New Home 2024). AN is recalling intimate ways of life by way of the material aspects of the photograph’s presence rather than the interpretational meaning or aesthetic achievements of the image itself. In the process, she seems to be interrogating the relationship between the photographic image and day-to-day life.

If AN can be seen as attempting to add “flesh” to the photographic image with her use of the printing process to fix the data-image to solid frames (in different forms) and create an awareness of a shared everyday sense based on material properties, we can also find another form of flesh in the temporal perceptions and narrative possibilities that arise in the relationships with individual and arrayed images. The photographs we encounter in the exhibition appear to show members of the artist’s family, close friends, and associated objects and landscapes. The interesting aspect here is the principle that AN Chorong applies to her images. Rather than using her camera to document decisive moments, she indulges in everyday “scenes” that appear to be randomly encountered—but that also seem natural above all else. Eschewing the assignment of too much meaning or symbolism to her individual subjects, she turns her attention to the situation in which they are situated and the ways in which objects exist in everyday settings, causing the viewer to reflect on how individuals exist in the order of things. The figures who appear in her photographs are boldly cropped, and the backdrops draw the gaze nearly as much as the objects at the center. Most of the objects are less signs meant to prove some special relationship with the artist than they are things that share the emotions running through characteristically abstract situations. The images are clearly “records” of everyday life, but their documentary messages and narratives are unclear. While they certainly seem to show the direct, concrete life surrounding the artist, she does not create identification by assigning emotions to the objects; individual objects lose their concreteness in images that hold the viewer’s gaze while at the same time maintaining a distinct sense of distance. As a result, the wrinkles and visible veins of an elderly woman are transposed into the heightened materiality of leather (Apricot and Woman 2020, Visiting Hours 2024, Happy Birthday 2024), while an image of hands massaging a senior citizen’s feet and legs (Massage 2020) leads to a foreign material sense that stems from the context between two bodies representing different times. At the same time, as images partially excerpted from the objects that form an individual’s space, the individual beliefs, desires, wishes, compulsions, and tastes that can be gleaned from them are reduced into images of objects themselves, stripped of their original signs and symbolic systems (Old House #1 2017, #2 2021, #3 2024, Wet Money on a Bed 2021). In some of the scenes, all that remains are parts of the body: hands cutting and distributing food on a table or moving busily in the object’s background. These transform into gestures that create a space for boldly introducing narratives from outside the frame, serving the innumerable narratives that others might impose upon them. Through relationships and compositional principles that remain too loose for classification, An’s photographs break away from individual memory and personal appreciation, drastically narrowing the gap vis-à-vis the viewer as they instead demand psychological, emotional, and narrative responses. The dates on which the photographs were taken are alluded to by the numbers at the end of each title. These offer proof that the images originated in recorded data, while establishing a certain rhythm of life through their recontextualization and rearrangement. In photographs that show scenes without hierarchy, symbols are deconstructed, and the secularized image begins to vibrate with emotions that are closer to life.

The exhibition norms invoked by the term “white cube” boast a structure founded upon the sacredness of religion and the strict objectivity of the courtroom. In a day and age when anyone can produce images with their own cameras and “exhibit” them on digital platforms, the photographer’s right to imbue a sense of sacredness appears to be slowly slipping away. Thus deprived of their ritualistic value, photographs appear everywhere as images bereft of weight. Yet it is the very mundanity of contemporary images that AN Chorong actively incorporates and appropriates. Ahead of any larger meaning that she might seek to assign her subjects as a photographer, she turns her attention to the moments when the objects speak for themselves as photography and its subjects come together. Just as there are spaces and scenes of unfathomable depth that the painter envisions when they look upon an empty canvas, the photographer perceives scenes where the world is “allowed” or “admitted” to suit the size of the frame. For the sake of these moments when objects speak for themselves, AN Chorong adds flesh to the thin surfaces of images and draws out the thick skin that is present underneath. Drawn up from within a data dump, her photographs transform into images of life and the everyday as potentialities for new contextual interpretations. The emotions that serve as the driving force here are intimate feelings of love, hate, regret, memory, and so forth. The flesh that is added to momentary data images gives these instantaneous, mundane images an affective sense of eternity.

1. On the artist’s homepage, many of the photographs she has taken are classified according to place names. Some are even placed in a folder labeled “null.” A closer look at the photographs in each category shows them to be quite different from commemorative images that document the characteristics of a given setting. Instead, we see wordless images that seem to drift in the categories arbitrarily assigned by the artist, with both the times and places left unclear.
2. W. J. T. Mitchell reinterprets the image as an agent rather than a mere symbol or means of conveying information. His perspective is one that takes the image as something harboring its own desires, which interact in turn with viewers and social contexts.
3. For instance, AN’s work Transposition (2021, Art Sonje Center, Seoul) makes use of quickly consumed and discarded advertising images as a way of encouraging the viewer to critically examine the process of our perceptions being internalized by contemporary pop culture images. Fem (2022, d/p, Seoul) focuses on what the women in the photographs see and what AN Chorong sees as a female photographer, commenting on femininity through its adoption of background images representing a “woman’s perspective” from within daily life.

Credit

Participating artists : AN Chorong
Curated by KIM Sung woo
Text by KIM Sung woo
Space construction : Mujindongsa
Photo by CJY ART STUDIO (CHO Junyong)

Supported by Arts Council Korea, 2025 ARKO Selection Visual Art, MnJ Foundation