GOYANG LOVE

More than half of the world’s population are living in cities by now. The life in Asian cities and megacities, is the theme of several ongoing photo projects of mine. In Goyang City, where I have lived for 1,5 years before, I photographed my series GOYANG LOVE from 2015-2018. This project deals with issues like idendity, home, privacy, longing and love in these artificial urban surroundings. Goyang City, with a population of about 1 million, is located north-west of Seoul, South Korea’ s sprawling capital. It was planned in 1989 by the national government as one of Koreas new towns or shin-doshi, but is yet another Korean city dominated by bland and grey concrete high-rise apartment towers. Consequently, my photo project GOYANG LOVE starts with several images of those apartment blocks photographed at dusk, before exploring the very colourfuI streets below. I started my series GOYANG LOVE to make visually sense of this place. With my view camera, I try to impose order and calmness on this often loud and chaotic city. As this planned community was populated with its residents right after its completion, I am interested to see how the citizens took it over and continue to personalise their spaces. Given the loving care displayed all over the city, I am very curious: Can one really love this place?