Route 7 asks…”Have you been living well?”

Art Journalist: Wan Sik Pyeon (The Segye Times)

When we just run straight, we are driven out of the time and pushed away. We regret for ‘lateness’ at the time when we realize that small things matter in life. It is a human being who suddenly leaves and one day looks himself back from the scenery.

As the family and the scenery that had just been there overlap, he asks himself, “Am I living well?” The pbotographer Kim Young Jae (67) left the road like this. From Busan to Goseong, on the 7th national highway stretching along the East Coast, he captured the landscape in his mind on the camera. He spent four years like that.

“The sea that I met about 100 times on the road became a ‘shelter of selfishness.’ I sucked all of miscellaneous thoughts like a black hole. The camera lens became that hole.”

He listened to the sound of the universe in the outcry of the sea and it’s fierce wave. He set down his heart on the water’s calmness. The scenery in the photographs is so soft, peaceful and lyrical that everyone is surprised. It’s like a cloud that covers soft fog or a mountaintop. It is not the sea as it is seen. It is about ‘peace’ which is harmonious universal order.

“The sound of the waves came up like sounding a moktak in a temple. I went around the 7th national road like a monk in meditation with the camera.”
He has escaped from the fast world and entered into slowness. At last, he took possession of the time and encountered the life. He also chose a long exposure black and white technique as his way of working on a project.

Both home and companies are in growth-first-belief. Now it is time for us to peer into the hidden side that is covered by the performance-first-belief. I want you to look at my picture and try to recall those thoughts.”

He has been photographing for 37 years. He will show about 20 works in this exhibition. The black and white photos seem to look like Jangsam of an old monk. From 15th to 20th, Gana Insa Art Center, Insa-dong.