Goodbye Stranger
Park Hyun Doo
Geonhi Foundation
Korean and English
Text by Woo Hye Soo and Park Hyun Doo
Hardcover
144 pages
250 x 220 mm
2010
ISBN 978899186510593600
As this work title indicates, Park addresses strangers. A stranger is perhaps one from another country; or another place. Park’s work begins with the emotion he felt while studying in the United States, when he felt like a stranger. With time, this concept has expanded and encompasses the isolation in human existence and alienation within human relations.
Park Hyun-doo shows human existence within the background of contemporary society. His work presents society’s structures, and encapsulates human desire. The artificial scenes and stage sets in his work act as the backdrop of modern life, space for communication, arguing that we all are social beings. Park calls the figures in his work strangers. They are the members of society, and individuals, who cannot affiliate with or escape the enormous system. Humans and their surroundings in our society appear reversed in his work, which is neither landscape nor figurative photography. Humans appear overwhelmed and eroded by the environments they create for themselves. With his work, Park contemplates our existence from a macroscopic perspective, presenting an intersection of the artificial and humanistic.
About the Artist
Park Hyun Doo is a South Korean photographer
About the Publisher
Geonhi Foundation was established in 2001 as a nonprofit art foundation. It contributes to the development of culture and art, and to cultural education for the public for the formation of a creative media environment, through its support of photography and media art production and research activities.
