‘Madam C’ features the lives of women who lie between self-constructed images and oneselves. Most of these photographs were taken in Bundang, a boom town not far from Seoul, the capital of Korea. Trying to perceive its interior space and people from a distance, I have found something not unique that we saw somewhere. It appears as a manipulated movie set and a place where happiness is made. In this place there is a slide between dissonance and consonance, which come from relationships between urban space and man.
All of us have bad faith(mauvaise foi) to some extent as far as we are exposed to others’ eyes and live a life conscious of others around us. For Sartre, bad faith is the essential attitude of existence. Although people in photographs have no intention to act, their behavior were staged. Bad faith emerges in this context. They tried to show themselves but were acting without being actually aware of it.
I applied mise-en-scène to express what I had seen, but I was uncertain what they would reveal. The reason is that this is a dimension of existence. The way they reveal themselves is not a stage of consciousness, and accordingly conscious manipulation is impossible. The image speaks for itself, and the mise-en-scène created by a false strategy becomes a non-interferable point. In my work, the mise-en-scène is the construction and manifestation of the image itself. The reason why the image could be manifested by bad faith is that it exists as a form. My intention is manifested in a form of life through the medium of an image, due to the self-deceptive elements of human existence.
Yisook Sohn
