Personal Landscape

Can someone belong to the land, if she was born there or lived there for a good while? Is this determined by where the body exists or what the spirit relies on to subsist? Is what we see the same as what there is? Or is what we see what we believe is there? There is a landscape that my physical eyes cannot see but my mind can discern. It doesn’t exist and yet it is always there. When I first came to New York, I spent a lot of time wandering around the city thinking of my hometown Seoul, which ironically, I had wanted to leave for long time. However at one point when I visited my country, I realized that it took more and more time to readjust to the city and find my bearings. The city that made me an outlander for the first time in my life also gave me a sense of belonging. Like it or not, the streets, smells and people became something that I grew accustomed to. On the other hand, the land that my blood belongs to, the wind where my past is alive, and the very air that my family is breathing is all leaving my body. The similarity and unfamiliarity of these two places have started to intermingle and balance each other out. Have I become a stranger and a native daughter to both places at the same time? In this series, I envisioned the third city that only exists in me. I built these cityscape to reconcile and call a truce to the contest they wage inside of me. For the past three years I photographed views of two cities, establishing two parallel archives without committing to a finalized vision for a digital composite. Among them, I chose the images which would function as main stages and then question repeatedly until I understood that something about them could be shifted or altered with an additional elements. At a technical level, all composites require that I carefully calibrate elements such as color temperature, perspective or shadows to make the photographs look seamless, just as if they existed in another city somewhere.