Boo Moon

Boo Moon is a photographer born in Daegu in 1955 and living in Seoul and Sokcho, South Korea. He took interest in photography in the early 1970s, quickly abandoned painting, which was to become his specialty, and enrolled in the Photography department of CHung-Ang University, Seoul. His very early works are mainly street photographs. Black and white pictures taken between 1972 and 1975 formed the core of his first solo show "Photo Poems" held in Seoul in 1975. Dark cityscapes imbued with uncertain anxiety and irony arose extremely opposite reactions. Boo Moon was labeled by the media as "a heretic of Korean photography." Some violent critics were only encouragement for him to continue with photography. In the 1970s, Boo Moon recorded with passion the rapid transformation of Korean society: villages in extinction, contrasts between urban and rural communities. Influenced by the anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss' work "Tristes Tropiques," he undertook to record traditional villages of Andong that were endangered by the nationwide movement of modernization.

By the 1980s, he began working on landscape and developed his thoughts on landscape as a means of self-reflection. Sea, sky, desert and expanses with no human presence were captured, and often printed in big sizes. Boo Moon started to work on his important series "On the Clouds" and seascapes in the middle of the 1990s. These were displayed in his solo exhibit at the Chapelle Saint Louise de la Salpetriere (Paris, 1997).

Since he devoted himself to art in 2000, he has created abundant works and exhibitions. His main issue remains in the experience of the infinity of nature and the representation of its presence. For him, photography is a method and the conclusion of his landscape experience: "When I'm in the field, the image itself decides what moment I am waiting for. Waiting is part of the encounter. Some might think that it's just by luck that all the elements come together to reveal the object to be photographed. But the image really is the culminating point in my complex experience of relationships with the world before me. I'm always amazed that it is possible to obtain an image in the fleeting second of an encounter between several physical and mental worlds. The moment when the shutter opens at last is the conclusion of a situation."