Girls In Uniform (since 2003) is an ongoing project that includes series of photographs, sculptures, installations and video works in plan.
Girls; also a metaphor for someone or somethings in transition, so it isn’t about age, it is about time. Therefore they are incomplete and unstable but highly charged.
Uniform: uniformity, conformity, repression
Anonymity: a certain sense of security/ also comes from anonymity
Driving force to do certain actions, 2nd nature or 2nd identity. Between these two there is a strong conflictual element, but also a possibility to establish alliances during complicated conditions.
The matter of social relationships between individuals and their environment appears in quite different shapes in each society. My project is based on the questions of the nature of social relationships between individual and mass and how these are reflected in the social environment. I am interested in sociological aspects of being and being formed as an individual, and from the point of identity.
The works in Girls In Uniform utilizes the paradoxical ability of photography to both involve a vow of authenticity and a frozen, emblematic, and hyperreal document.The images use a narrative code where the props often have a key role, but generate suspense by means of stages preceding or following the actual decisive, or fatal, events. The rituals, exercises and struggles between the individuals occur in isolated or peripheral locations, which are chosen to underline and contrast with the ambivalence of the transitional character and stages of adolescence.
In the sculptures, the thing-in-itself is revealed – the clothes, fabrics, and physical details. The presence of an illusory body, along with its simultaneous, ethereal absence, allow for scenes connected to notions like drama, diorama and theatre.
As relations between the individual, the uniform (second identity) and society are not an exclusively Korean, or Asian, concern, the work acquired a new and expanded geographic and psychological meaning in its later phases. Even though school uniforms exist all over the world, and are actually more of a rule than an exception, their role within my project has become more and more metaphorical. This later part of “Girls In Uniform” also reflects my own biography, as my art is based in Sweden in order to explore environments in Europe, such as Italy for instance.
In the photographs we see constructions of events/narratives that are parallel to the commonplace. Many of my locations/scenery in my works can refer to Heterotopia. These are spaces of otherness, which are neither here nor there, that are simultaneously physical and mental.
These choice of settings is central, I want the photographs to possess a theatric quality theatric at they same time as they refer to documentary (or psychological portraits). The project has more and more developed into studies of elements in settings where the historical and architectural aspects are of considerable importance.
In my photographic staging at these locations, my use of models, props, and the situations they are involved in are all employed in relation to the history of the site, for deeper relations between storyline and its visualization.
Hyun-Jin Kwak
