Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2025 i Aperture

MNEMOSYNE ATLAS One of my all-time favorite artworks. Conceived by Aby Warburg in 1924 and left unfinished at the time of his death five years later, the Mnemosyne Atlas is a giant compendium of photographs of artworks as well as other images from across Western visual culture categorized and mounted on sixty-three panels, through which Warburg attempted to map the “afterlife of antiquity.” His project strikes me as something like an early internet search produced by one idiosyncratic mind. Warburg tries to be objective and comprehensive (the Atlas contains nearly a thousand images), and yet his work includes an enormous amount of personal decision making and subjective, enduring beauty. ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA The most kitsch object of all! The idea that you could distill all human knowledge into a single set…

“THE NAME ‘SÖUL’ MEANS SIMPLY ‘CAPITAL.’ THERE IS nothing particularly original in this name,” wrote Percival Lowell in his 1886 book Chosön, the Land of the Morning Calm: A Sketch of Korea. The American polymath and astronomer visited Korea via Japan in the winter of 1883, on a trip arranged by the Japanese consul in Korea. Lowell also referred to another name for the capital—“Han Yang”—which he translated as “the Sunshine of China,” based on an alternative interpretation of the Chinese characters. As a foreign visitor from Boston with no knowledge of local Asian languages, Lowell relied on a Japanese interpreter who spoke both Korean and English for his understanding of the capital’s name. In reality, “Hanyang” refers specifically to the area north of the Han River, which runs east to…

In February 1962, Youngsook Park happened upon an exhibition in Seoul and was completely captivated by a single photograph. The image, titled Broken Window, made by Hyoyel Kim, cropped a finely fragmented pane of glass. To Park, the partially fractured window mirrored a broken world. The picture appeared in an exhibition of the Modern Photography Society (MPS), a young photographers’ group formed to reject the conventional modes of realism that dominated Korean photography at the time. The society drew inspiration from Salon Ars, an earlier group that shaped Korea’s modernist photography movement. Stirred by this experience, Park decided to pursue the medium, becoming actively involved with both Salon Ars and the MPS. As a student at Sookmyung Women’s University, she founded Suk Mi Heo, one of the leading women’s photography…

NIKKI S. LEE’S NAME CARRIES A STRANGE CURRENCY in the Korean art world, sparking instant recognition but also a sense of enduring mystery. After all, Lee’s breakout series, Projects (1997–2001), which began as a graduate-school project and was first exhibited while she was in her twenties and living in New York, saw the artist assume the guise of over a dozen of characters as she descended into different US subcultures, photographing herself amid drag queens, punks, skateboarders, strippers, and other communities mostly on the fringes of society. The series catapulted Lee to international stardom, while establishing her as something of an enfant terrible, all while raising a question that was never really answered: Who is the “real” Nikki S. Lee? Her mystique deepened in the aughts when Lee, whose work…

E. TAMMY KIM (“K-Fragments,” page 100) is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, where she covers politics, labor, and the Koreas, among other topics. A former lawyer, Kim is also a Puffin Writing Fellow at Type Media Center and a contributing editor at Lux. In this issue, Kim introduces a portfolio by the artist Chorong An. JEEHEY KIM (“Becoming Seoul,” page 46) is a writer, researcher, and curator focused on the history of visual culture in East Asia. An associate professor in the art history program at the University of Arizona, Kim earned her doctorate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. In 2023, she published Photography and Korea (2023), the first book on the history of…

People have inhabited the area that is now contemporary Seoul for more than six thousand years. Scholars say that proto-forms of photography, namely the camera obscura, arrived around 1631, having been introduced through books brought from China. The city’s first photographic studio dates to around 1883. Occupying a peninsula surrounded by China, Japan, and Russia, South Korea has been at the center of dramatic historical and political flux over the centuries, enduring war, disaster, occupation, and division. Unsurprisingly, many of the country’s photographers grapple with the geopolitics and festering tensions of the past and the all-too-real anxieties of the present, among them a perpetual cold war with North Korea and an ongoing crisis of democracy that sparked large-scale protests after a now-impeached president declared martial law last December. Seoul, a…

IN SEOUL, SCREENS DO MORE THAN MEDIATE—THEY are the city’s skin. Self-illuminating surfaces define the visual landscape. Beyond the personal devices people carry, public and semipublic spaces are saturated with screens. This isn’t merely about the moving images on giant billboards. The media facades that light up downtown are just one layer of the city’s dazzling environment. From bus stops and subway guides to advertising panels and restaurant kiosks, screens punctuate the city—take, for instance, Samsung Electronics’ 2019 installation of 4,218 smart signage displays across ninety subway stations. Even elevator control panels and apartment security locks have become glowing interfaces, mediating daily routines through digital surfaces. More revealing, perhaps, is the mutable nature of these screens, which constantly shift in function, form, and meaning. A single surface alternates between information…

AN HOUR’S DRIVE SOUTH OF SEOUL’S CENTER, IN Seongnam City, the photographer Bohnchang Koo occupies two small buildings resting on a verdant hillside. Designed by an architect friend twenty-five years ago, the airy buildings serve as Koo’s living space, studio, and home for a sprawling, eclectic collection. Ceramic vessels sit atop bookshelves, a decorative paper lantern in the shape of a lotus flower hangs from the ceiling, a rusted cash register proudly presents itself as an objet trouvé, and ancient wooden doors from the late Joseon dynasty enjoy a new life as window shutters. Under a vitrine is a recent acquisition: a thousand-year-old figure from Inner Mongolia, part human, part animal. “I could feel the touch of the craftsman who made it,” Koo tells me, recalling what attracted him to…

Skinny pearlescent legs swoosh beneath a short dress. A knife slices through a cream-filled doughnut. Naked models limply embrace. An altar offering of dried fish sits next to a flowerlike octopus. A plastic doll lies abandoned at the base of a column. Then, there are the females: a baby girl on her tummy, two adolescent girls, a prim woman applying makeup, a grandmother. These photographs are rectangularly clipped and arrayed against chiffony landscapes. Together—necessarily together—they make me chuckle, then choke. I know these absurd expectations of femininity, the animal pleasures of food. Here is life under the regime of K-beauty. The photographer Chorong An is a fan of accumulation. She does not fear surplus. Nor is she precious about the authorship of any given picture or it being one of…

Where does the meaning of an image reside? Within the subject of the image, or within the image itself? How does that meaning become fixed and, perhaps more importantly, unfixed? For nearly two decades, Heeseung Chung has asked these deceptively simple questions across an eclectic sweep of photographs. Wary of the camera’s tendency to iron out experiences into a single, smooth narrative, Chung creates ciphers to be endlessly recombined and reinterpreted, her pictures collectively forming an exuberant pageant of non sequiturs. Chung thought painting was her fate. Her childhood in Seoul was spent in front of easels, and she eventually went to university for painting. She first picked up a camera to make reference photographs for her canvases, and not long after, turned her tiny apartment into a darkroom. Chung…

Tyler Mitchell Growing up in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, Tyler Mitchell made skateboarding videos inspired by Spike Jonze and Ryan McGinley. After enrolling at New York University with plans to become a filmmaker, he began to make portraits full of energy, brash color, and sartorial panache, honing a signature look that landed him commissions for i-D and Vogue. This fall, Mitchell’s exhibition Wish This Was Real arrives in Paris after stops in Berlin, Helsinki, and Lausanne, Switzerland. Covering roughly a decade of image making, the show offers new perspectives on his abiding themes of masculinity, joy, and beauty. As the critic Salamishah Tillet writes in an accompanying monograph published by Aperture, “Mitchell’s work brilliantly reconceptualizes familiar spaces and teaches us that Black utopia has always been a place, constantly…

Heinkuhn Oh rose to prominence with his photographs of social types—high school students, cosmetic girls, soldiers—often printed at gargantuan scale. Their faces greet visitors to Oh’s airy studio in southern Seoul. Uncanny, at times disarming expressions hint at the layered ambiguity present throughout his work. Although Oh’s portraits emerged from discrete series dedicated to groups, each subject’s eccentricities break through such categories, subtly dramatizing tensions between collective and personal identity in Korean society. Oh’s early work was informed by his ambition to become a filmmaker and his years living and traveling in the United States. Equally influential was his experience growing up in Itaewon, a neighborhood in Seoul that was once a roiling tenderloin whose nightclubs and brothels catered to US soldiers. Today, it is one of the city’s trendiest…

IN OCTOBER 2018, AT A PRESS CONFERENCE IN SEOUL, the Swiss architect Jacques Herzog was rather candid when he shared his opinion of the city. The capital was “stamped by commercial life, surrounded by an ocean of contemporary architecture with no identity and coherent style,” a local newspaper, Korea JoongAng Daily, reported him as saying. That is not the nicest remark about a place you are visiting, and where you are preparing a major project (a striking corporate headquarters and cultural space in the luxe Gangnam neighborhood). But more important, it’s not really true. Yes, when you ride in a car through many parts of town, you see a profusion of bland, gray-paneled buildings, plenty emblazoned with logos of all the small businesses and shops inside. And yes, there is…

In the midday sunlight of upstate New York, I had no way of knowing how cold the night of December 3, 2024, was in South Korea, how dark and long it had been. With a fourteen-hour time difference, martial law in South Korea felt incomprehensible to me, like seeing the future of my homeland. But for the Seoulbased photographer Yezoi Hwang, it was the present. The words martial law, heard while having dinner, communicated something she couldn’t believe without seeing with her own eyes. So she picked up her camera and went out into the square. Hwang often uses her camera in an effort to understand the incomprehensible. After making series that focused on her family—capturing, for example, stories of conflict and reconciliation in Season (2016)—she gradually redirected her lens…

I received a surprising piece of fan mail this summer. The artist Finnegan Shannon was emailing because they wanted to share my 2023 photobook, Anonymous Objects: Inscrutable Photographs and the Unknown, with a friend. But there was no screen-reader-accessible version and Shannon’s friend, the artist and writer M. Leona Godin, is blind. Could I share the text in another format? Screen-reader software gives people who are blind or who have low vision access so that they can navigate digital content. The software reads content aloud or transmits it to a braille display. I was familiar with the creation of alt text, an option buried on social-media platforms that allows users to provide descriptions of posted images. But I had no idea how screen readers worked with digital documents—or what happens…