NO FRIENDS: photography at Gallery Jungdabang

I was invited to this little café gallery show on facebook. I decided to check it out and found that they were still setting everything up, but the crew was really cool about letting me poke around and even take pictures. The main event was really just these five large-format photos. Reading Joon-ki Kim's artist statement, the focus is on loneliness, and that's easy to see, but it seems more specifically like a meditation on the problem of other minds, or the intense loneliness that comes from the realization that there is no way to prove that you are not surrounded by philosophical zombies. I think about that kind of thing with appalling frequency. The settings also capture some of the gritty reality of Seoul, and the sense of being alone even in places that are (usually) crowded with people.

The pictures look better if you click on them and see them displayed bigger!

This one might be my favorite.