Night and Night, Onsu-Gonggan, Seoul
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Night and Darkness
Ziwon Hwang
Did we come to notice, in some hidden corner of the garden, the difference between night and darkness?
The garden of night. Even in the garden of evening, the leaves of trees marked with name tags—Jeong-hye, Eun-hye, Mi-hye—
cast their shadows: leaves, shadows, leaves casting shadows again.
Where have the women of the garden all scattered?
Han Saram 3, Kim Haeng-sook
Like a cover that conceals a scent sharp enough to sting the tip of the nose, I tightly hide everything that seeps out, little by little, into the darkness. There is no real need to see it. After all, there are times in life that exist yet cannot be seen.
But the pale yellow dawn continues to cast itself over the scene. They—the women—are captured as if setting off on some unknown journey.
Not deadpan, but with expressions swept up in affect, their faces stand in stark contrast to the landscapes that play out like scenes on a screen as they sleep.
We have no need for indifference. It is only when I step into the photograph that I, too, am enveloped by feeling.
The ambiguous stillness of the photograph appears as a layered space, hovering somewhere between the intellectual and the sensory, as if intent on breaking apart familiar signs, as if freeing itself from a prescribed finitude.
It is real, and yet not real. It is something inexpressibly distorted, imagined. Her labor—forever tied solely to a private life and thus never directly faced—has rendered part of her existence a vision: elusive, fleeting, hovering at the edge of visibility.
No photograph can capture that shiver-inducing, insidious subtlety. In truth, photography has always been about a kind of “-ness”—the very essence of being photographic.
Photographic-ness. In the darkroom, where negatives reverse and connect, fidelity no longer matters.
Does vertigo not finally arise when a single image refuses to stand on its own and instead six images seep into the field of vision at once?
This is the sensation of existence: uncertain, unreliable, opaque, loose—absorbed by the retina, yet, like light that leaks through even closed eyelids, incomplete and impossible to trust.
Let us distinguish from the “official darkness”—which can be described as the interruption of the controlled, active day—what we might call a “subsidiary darkness.”
An induced darkness, a darkness that arises in opposition to the day, a darkness where, at once limited and infinite, action takes place.
Black: The Brilliance of a Non-Color, Alain Badiou