Korea Week: Nanda - LENSCRATCH

Korea Week: Nanda by Joanne Junga YangJanuary 24, 2016

©Nanda

Nanda was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1969. She lives and works in Seoul. She studied fiber art(1993) and Visual art (2009) in South Korea. Nanda works with photographic, installation, and sculpture medium; she is especially interested in how visual media, which aims at reality and spectacle, has influenced people and society since the modern era. Nanda has held a number of private exhibitions and has participated in numerous group exhibitions. She won ‘Photo award 2015’ (Gallery Now).

©Nanda

Modern Girl

Thanks to the invention of photograph in early 19th century it became possible to duplicate numbers of the same image. Along with the ability to reproduce came confusion as to the uniqueness of the reproduction. And it was the era when several empires began to inculcate their own cultures on Joseon Dynasty. The way of inculcating different culture on a colonial country might have been similar to that of making a studio for films or soap operas in the sense that everything has to be reappeared on a new setting.

Studios are made for the sake of shooting and the revival of a certain era and culture. And they construct the backgrounds to create a realistic scene as if to draw the audience into the film. Based on circular reasoning of capitalism, most film studios are not dismantled after shooting, they are often reused as tourist attraction. By taking a look around the site, tourist get the opportunity to get caught up in the nostalgia of being in the same location where a certain here or heroine played their role in the movie. They often amuse themselves by matching the sets to where they appear in the film just like ‘picture puzzling’, and some tourists would take pictures of themselves posing next to an actor’s life-sized image, wearing costumes provided. Those scenes are a little are a little bit ludicrous. However, like other by these set ups of the modern time to create, direct shoot the virtual images that I thought of.

The image making process of mine is similar to that of making a film studio when we look at the fact they both are made by referring old documents, discolored photographs and images from damaged films. We might easily lose directions in the process of revival along with inevitable misinterpretation, since we have to decode and make reappear something from only vague and uncertain materials. Just like the ‘Moo-lan-roo-jo’ originally meant the Moulin Rouge in Paris, the modern girls in the simplified version of hanbok with a fancy and heels might have wanted to be like Mary Louise Brooks, the heroine of motion pictures.