KANGHEE KIM

INTERCHANGEABLE​​
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When David Datuna ate the banana in Maurizio Cattelan's $120,000 artwork, another banana took its place. Looking at Andreas Gursky's photographs, I found myself imagining the faces of distant figures exchanged without anyone noticing. These two encounters left me with a question I couldn't separate from everyday life: if the idea and outward form remain intact, how much does the individual matter? Interchangeable grew from that unease. I began looking at the ways a recognizable role can outlast, and sometimes obscure, the person who occupies it, thereby rendering an individual without identity dispensable. My questions about clothing and status led me to the uniform, a garment that seems to introduce a person before they can introduce themselves. It names an occupation, suggests authority, and places its wearer within an order of roles. I became interested in the person left inside that outline. If another face appeared above the same collar, would we notice the exchange? If one person moved through several uniforms, would we recognize a life continuing beneath them? At five in the afternoon, Yejeong Kim finishes her work as a nurse at a public health center and heads to a nearby studio to teach Pilates. These photographs follow the same person across that change of clothes. Yet without her name or story, the images might seem to hold two separate lives: a nurse here, an instructor there. A police officer stands before the camera. So does Byeongwook Jeong. I wanted to hold those two ways of seeing him in the same image. At his actual workplace, I covered his face with a translucent disc, obscuring his identity within the scene itself. I underexposed the background by two stops and used flash to overpower the sunlight, bringing the uniform and obscured face forward. As the surroundings recede, the clothing becomes easier to read and the person harder to know. The photograph asks how readily we allow one to stand in for the other.

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