Artist Park Chanmin Reconsiders the Relationship Between Urban Environment and Human Through Photography - K-ARTNOW
Park Chanmin (b.1970) Seoul, Korea

Park Chanmim graduated from Korea University’s Department of German Literature (1997) and obtained a master’s degree from Chung-Ang University’s Graduate School of Photography (2008). After that, he graduated from the University of Edinburgh, UK with a Master’s degree in Contemporary Art (2011).

Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

From the beginning of his work to the present, he has been steadily taking photos of urban spaces and living environments. In 2008, Gallery Lux (Seoul, Korea) was selected for a young artist support contest and held his first solo exhibition.

After studying in the UK, he returned to Korea and exhibited at Makeshop Art Space (Paju, Korea) and Gallery On (Seoul, Korea) in 2013, and held an exhibition to commemorate the award of the ILWOO Photography Award at ILWOO Space (Seoul, Korea) in 2015. So far (2022), he has held nine solo exhibitions, and most recently, he presented the exhibition 《We Built This City》 at Gallery Jinun (Seoul, Korea) in 2021.

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Participated in group exhibitions held at Korean Cultural Center Gallery (Ottawa, Canada), Daegu Arts Center (Daegu, Korea), Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea), Space K (Daegu, Korea), Seoul Museum of History (Seoul, Korea), Korean Cultural Center UK (London, UK), Dong-gang Museum of Photography (Yeongwol, Korea).

Awards (Selected)

He was selected as the 1st SKOPF (KT&G Sangsangmadang Korean Photographer’s Fellowship, Korea) and won the 6th ILWOO Photography Award exhibition section (ILWOO Foundation, Korea).

Collections (Selected)

His works are in collections of various museums and foundations such as The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art(Gwacheon, Korea), ILWOO Foundation, Daegu Museum of Art(Daegu, Korea), Goeun Museum of Photography, (Busan, Korea), Seoul Museum of Art(Seoul, Korea), The Sovereig Art Foundation (Hong Kong).

Originality & Identity

‘Observing’ is an attempt to look into the whole, not into details. It is easy to discover a schematic structure by applying a high-level view. The photography of Park Chanmin explores the structure of urban areas and captures the life essence of the city people.

“In all cities, individuals can only discover the difference in their life by knowing what space is built in the city.”

Park Chanmin’s various photographic series are somewhat different in material and form. He completes his work through post-finishing using graphic programs by inserting city building images on the screen. In this process, the artist removes certain elements in the image, such as the name of apartment buildings or the windows on the exterior walls. It is the artist’s underlying assumption behind his works, delivering his awareness of problems through a strategy of contextualising the photographed photos by erasing some of the spatial information.

The landscape of the entire city shows the overall impression as compressed visuals such as the structure of the city and the collaborative life of the city people. As the reality of nature and the city is left behind, it still looks somewhat realistic. However, the audience can easily find the traces and areas of tampering applied by the artist. Naturally, the audience actively understands the interpretation of the work by observing what the artist has erased and what remains without erasing.

Park Chanmin reveals the structure of the desire underlying modern society in his photographs. His photographs visualize the universal essence of urban space while carefully evoking awareness of standardized urban life. His photographs visualise the universal essence of urban space. At the same time, the artist tries to elicit different interpretations of the city by maintaining a neutral perspective throughout the work.

Style & Contents

The artist Park Chanmin is interested in Korea’s housing culture and its artifacts and social issues. These impressions come from his childhood experience of moving from a spacious apartment to a small multi-family living apartment. His first series of residential spaces, ‘Intimate City’(2007~2009), looked at a city landscape lined with apartments in a haze from a high location. The similar image of apartments that erased the name of the building or traces, creates a uniform appearance of the city in his works.

Afterwards, the artist studied abroad in Edinburgh, where he studied apartment houses in Scotland compared to Korea. In his series named ‘Blocks’(2010~ ), the vertical surface of the exterior of the building begins to be erased from the work. The artist removes the windows and balconies of the apartment building and turned it into a surreal appearance that was completely blocked off. A building, where no sound leaks out and no outside sounds can be heard from inside, becomes an anonymous space not different from a warehouse or container. It becomes a dead space where no communication exists.

Meanwhile, in his series work, ‘Untitled; The Level of Deception’(2012~2014), the artist raises the questions about the perception of urban space in which context has been removed through photographs of European cities with the background erased. The photography series named ‘Urbanscape; surrounded by Space’(2012~ ) creates a geometric landscape with the facades of buildings that are approaching each other closely. The simpler the surface of the building, the more difficult it is to feel the breathing and the sense of life of the people living in the building.

The perspective of Park Chanmin, looking at the place of modern people’s life, gradually expands from the apartment to the entire city space. ‘Citis’(2015~ ) is a series of photos looking down on major Asian cities including Seoul. A photograph of a city lined with abstract buildings like toy models is somewhat heterogeneous. He simplified the facades of buildings with flat, achromatic colour surfaces, emphasizing the lines and surfaces composing the space.

In front of Park Chanmin’s work, the audience discovers the universal image of a city easily found in any country in modern societies, along with the urban structure of cities like Seoul, with its vertically dense high-rise buildings. Also, the entire anonymized city, rather than a building, is faced with a structure that has lost its function as if it had become muted.

Constancy & Continuity

Although the spatial feature has been erased, the audience will be able to quickly recognize the place photographed by Park Chanmin through the terrain and impressions. The skyline buildings and the flow of streamline and roads are his own art materials. However, to appreciate his work, it is not so important to know where it is or to learn information about each city.

Park Chanmin captures various architectures and various cities in his works, but the purpose of his art is not to show their special typological differences. The city that he sees is a homogeneous space, with only differences in its geographical name and minor details. Modern cities dominated by the floor area ratio (FAR) and economic feasibility have standardized and mass-produced even the appearance of people’s life.

In his work, to express the essence of a city, the neutrally filmed image is modulated in post-production. Unlike the method of capturing the scene of an event with historical significance or directing a specific scene, it suggests a new context by using a more pictorial language.

In his photographs, the city is visualized in an abstract form. There are similar stylized abstract paintings that repeat basic characteristics by changing only the composition little by little. The artist’s work that utilizes photography as a ‘tool of expression that is based on reality but connects and expands reality’ shows a new type of modern photography. What will the city of tomorrow create and what will future photographs of Park Chanmin look like?

Artist Park Chanmin Reconsiders the Relationship Between Urban Environment and Human Through Photography
A Team

Park Chanmin (b. 1970) has explored the relationship between the structure of urban spaces and the people living within them through photography. The artist observes how, despite their apparent differences, the buildings that fill the city ultimately form a similar concrete jungle. Likewise, while urban dwellers live according to their individual personalities, their identities are often concealed within the masses, becoming blurred.

Park focuses on the relationship where the environment affects the people living in it, while the people, in turn, alter their surroundings. He captures the urban environment with a contemplative approach, reflecting this dynamic interaction.


Park Chanmin, Intimate City 01, 2008 ©Park Chanmin

Park Chanmin's first series on urban spaces, Intimate City (2007-2009), features black-and-white photographs of cityscapes viewed from a distance. The densely packed buildings in his images appear as one large, indistinct mass, obscured by a hazy atmosphere.

He used digital techniques to remove the names of apartment buildings, further emphasizing the uniformity and anonymity of the urban environment. The black-and-white treatment of the photographs heightened this monotonous portrayal of the city.


Park Chanmin, Untitled; The Level of Deception 01, 2012 ©Park Chanmin

From 2012 to 2014, Park worked on the series Untitled; The Level of Deception, where he expanded beyond Korean urban environments to capture buildings in Europe, including the UK and the Netherlands. By digitally removing the backgrounds of these buildings, he rendered their purposes and contexts ambiguous, creating an unreal atmosphere.

These works raise questions about how we perceive space and challenge the notion of photography as a purely factual medium.

Park Chanmin, BL212372259126385023, 2012 ©Park Chanmin

In 2010, Park Chanmin introduced the Blocks series, focusing on apartment buildings in Korea and communal housing in Scotland. As in his previous series, he used post-processing techniques to erase the details of the buildings, obscuring their identities and transforming them into massive, indistinct blocks.

In Blocks, the reduced distance between the camera and the buildings emphasizes their presence. Park removed windows, doors, balconies, traces of daily life, signs, advertisements, and nameplates, leaving only the uniform concrete surfaces.


Park Chanmin, BL105565103104512, 2010 ©Park Chanmin

Park Chanmin developed the Blocks series with the idea that while apartment buildings may appear to shape their identities and value through branding, they are ultimately just immense concrete blocks. By removing the passageways between interior and exterior, Park presents these buildings as uniform masses, symbolizing the standardized, communication-lacking lives of the urban dwellers inhabiting them.


Park Chanmin, Urbanscape_042, 2012 ©Park Chanmin

After this, Park Chanmin's interest expanded to various urban environments, leading to the Urbanscape; Surrounded by Space (2012-) series, which captured urbanscapes from places like Seoul, Busan, Daegu, Hong Kong, and Macau. These works portray dense clusters of buildings, with their facades overlapping and enclosing each other. Although the backgrounds vary across different cities, the images emphasize the lines and surfaces within the urban spaces, creating what appears to be geometric patterns rather than showcasing the unique characteristics of each region.


Park Chanmin, Urbanscape_002, 2014 ©Park Chanmin

As Park observed the coexistence of residential, commercial, and sometimes industrial spaces in contemporary cities, he reflected on how these spaces we create increasingly surround and enclose us. Like conducting case studies, he continued this series by documenting and arranging images of cities to reveal the common structural patterns shared across diverse urban environments.

Park Chanmin, CTS 04_HKG, 2016 ©Park Chanmin

Park Chanmin's recent Cities series, similar to his previous Blocks series, captures urbanscapes with their architectural details meticulously removed. While Blocks focused on buildings from a close-up perspective, emphasizing the architecture itself, Cities illuminates vast urban landscapes from a distant viewpoint, almost like an aerial map.

Rather than highlighting the differences and unique qualities of cities like Hong Kong and Osaka, Park concentrated on the structural similarities of urban spaces. To achieve this, he simplified detailed elements, allowing the overall structure to stand out, resembling dioramas or aerial views, where the densely packed urban forms are prominently displayed.


Park Chanmin, CTS 09_Tokyo, 2016 ©Park Chanmin

As Park Chanmin observed cities across different countries, he came to believe that, despite their distinct names and histories, many cities ultimately evolve in similar forms. This phenomenon may be a result of humanity’s desires converging beyond cultural and regional differences, or perhaps we have always been striving for the same thing.

Park’s perspective on these cities does not reveal any criticism or pessimism. Instead, his work embarks on a journey to explore the true nature and structure of modern cities through the medium of photography, capturing the essence of urban spaces and the lives of those who inhabit them.


Park Chanmin, CTS 06_Osaka, 2015 ©Park Chanmin

“In all cities, individuals can only discover the difference in their life by knowing what space is built in the city.”

Artist Park Chanmin ©Park Chanmin

Park Chanmim graduated from Korea University’s Department of German Literature (1997) and obtained a master’s degree from Chung-Ang University’s Graduate School of Photography (2008). After that, he graduated from the University of Edinburgh, UK with a Master’s degree in Contemporary Art (2011). He held his first solo exhibition in 2008 after being selected for a young artist support contest at Gallery Lux (Seoul, South Korea). Up until 2022, he has had nine solo exhibitions.

He was selected as the 1st SKOPF (KT&G Sangsangmadang Korean Photographer’s Fellowship, Korea) and won the 6th ILWOO Photography Award exhibition section (ILWOO Foundation, Korea). His works are in collections of various museums and foundations such as The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art(Gwacheon, Korea), ILWOO Foundation, Daegu Museum of Art(Daegu, Korea), Goeun Museum of Photography, (Busan, Korea), Seoul Museum of Art(Seoul, Korea), The Sovereig Art Foundation (Hong Kong).

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