SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS.- The Peabody Essex Museum presents "Bohnchang Koo: Contemporary Korean Photography," on view through February 18, 2003. The Peabody Essex Museum is pleased to present the first American retrospective of Bohnchang Koo, one of the premier Korean photographers working today. In the tradition of the Korean sensibility, Bohnchang Koo draws heavily from the landscapes of the natural world.  His imagery of delicate lines and washes of varying grays are inspired by things such as vines against a wall to dust caked on stucco. The photographs are inspired by the imagination and see beyond the mundane aspects of walls, vines and natural patterns.

 

After receiving a degree in business administration in Seoul, Bohnchang Koo pursued a diploma in photography at Fach Hoch Schule in Hamburg.  Currently, he is a professor at Kaywon School of Art and Design outside Seoul, Korea.  Koo has shown his work in numerous group shows in the United States and has had eleven solo exhibitions internationally.  

 

Art critic, Hyunsook Kim, writes about Koo, who "photographs images of the fragile and the fleeting, never the immortal, of distance and solitude, never attachment or survival.  An object gets old from use, remaining indifferent to artistic intention and control, attentive only to its own unerring interior progression, which leaves its disappearing traces long after the photo has been taken, thus moving its past into the future.  And thus artist and spectator, who exist outside the photo and cannot enter it, must wander as strangers.  From the initial choice of subject, loss is inevitable.

 

Koo, who has taken time and again the same interior voyage to examine his shadows, has finally crossed a frontier and come out into the world. Now he stretches out his hand to touch it.  The White series is a world of small and fragile tremors that disperse like wind-swept powder or that resist, bend and break.  Destiny’s fleeting object, disappearance and sadness of life even before life ever was, returns to silence.  In this fleeting is splendor, refinement and beauty."