MONØkult Interview: Seong-Heon Choi
Behind the curtains of the orderly capital of Seoul stands a grittier, darker universe — the district of Jongno, where the 1981 born Korean photographer Seong-Heon Choi goes roaming the streets in search of some stringy happenings.
This area, that he describes as “a little marginalized from the city, with decrepit buildings, nostalgic old people and poor homeless ones”, gives a sharp contrast to the city of Seoul itself, a place with “well-ordered buildings, streets and clean, ordinary and wealthy people”.
While Jongno is the place that gives him “tremendous inspiration”, it looks like it could easily be the background of a story, and through his pictures, we can easily envision a dark and violent movie, with a hint of film-noir, depicting the underworld of Korean society; a place that smells like violence, sex and secrets.
“I think of a showgirl in a cult movie. Seoul is the colorful stage and Jongno is what lives behind the curtains, where many human groups exist”.
Taking street photography in unpolished and raw ways, Seong-Heon takes his pictures without any intended plan, in his daily life, informing the glorious characters shown his works by holding the camera and watching them to capture them. Working with the duty to convince them to be immortalized, even though “they often don’t understand why they’re being shooted”, he’s hunting for the more engaging filthiness that secretly stains the shininess of the Korean metropolis — a subject he calls “EDGE OF THE CITY”.
Stimulated by the rough textures and strong contrasts of the works of the legendary Daido Moriyama — his favorite photographer along with Anders Peterson — he devoted himself to black and white photography as a result of his colorblindness, that puzzled him long time ago when the color negative films he used to work with were inexorably expressed differently from his intention.
Lately, Seong-Heon Choi travelled to Tokyo for a few days and took some pictures there — as harsh as his usual work — describing Tokyo as “a city that resembles Seoul, lively during the day, erotic at night”, still looking for the alienated realities hidden in those urban jungles.
