Photo : Five Rooms

DOOSAN Gallery Seoul is pleased to announce a group exhibition, Photo: Five Rooms from July 14th to August 27th, 2016.

Focusing on works by five prominent artists in Korea, the exhibition focuses on observing the present status and the future possibilities of Korean contemporary photography.

Until the early 20th Century, the camera was an instrument which re-presented reality the way it is. The photograph was deemed a replacement of the actual subject, and due to this conventional notion, photography during Impressionism came to replace the representational function of the painting.

In the contemporary age, photography came to be seen as a medium through which to express the artist’s thoughts and imagination, and something more than just a ‘documentation of the visible world.’ Today, countless artists use photography as a medium of a completely new concept, and photography has broken free from its traditional realm of use and has firmly established itself as a genre of contemporary art alongside painting and sculpture.

While many artists in Korea also use photography as their main medium, the aesthetic, art historical and critical dialogue on photography is somewhat lacking. This exhibition hopes to function as a site of discussion on the present status and future directions of photography as a contemporary art practice and contribute to an in-depth discourse on photography at large.