An exhibition of photographs by Park Chanmin, who shows the realities of contemporary cities as surreal as their schematic designs, will be held from October 1 to 24 at Gallery Jinsun in Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul.
 
Park was born in the city, grew up seeing the city, and has been interested in the urban structure that multiplies and expands, studying its essence. His early work < Blocks > reinterpreted the city in the form of dots, lines, and planes by erasing the tangible shells of apartments, small buildings, windows, doors, and names.
 
The artist's interest then expands and expands from individual buildings to a wider < Urbanscape >, from the urban building forest to the urban spatial envelope. The metropolitan landscapes in < Cities > clearly reveal their distinctive structural forms, with each city stripped of superficial details, leaving only a solid mass of buildings, giving the impression of a bird's eye view of the city.
 
Seoul, Busan, Hong Kong, and Tokyo are different countries and different cities, but the mass of detail-less cities are hard to distinguish from each other, existing as one giant mass of similar artificial landscapes.
 
This exhibition expands on the artist's amplified interpretation of the city as a sculpture of time' with a bolder and more intimate perspective. Park's cityscapes are expanded and enlarged into an urban panorama that encompasses buildings, mountains, oceans, rivers, roads, bridges, overpasses, and landscapes.
 
As the title of < We Built this City > suggests, the artist tells the viewer through the urban panorama that the city is a product of human desires, conflicts, competitions, and compromises, and that in the end, 'the city is a huge man-made agglomeration that we have created' through his formative language.

References

• 갤러리 진선 (Gallery Jinsun)