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Paris : Ahn Sun Mi, Gong Zone

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Paris’s La Loo & Lou Gallery opened last June and is currently hosting the work of young Korean artist Ahn Sun Mi (born in Busan in 1982), coinciding with France-­Korea Year. The exhibition at the gallery, found in the Haut-­Marais area of Paris, is entitled the Gong Zone and features 10 large-format photographs produced between 2007 and 2015.

­Ahn Sun Mi made the journey from Busan to Paris at the age of 21 in 2004. She left behind her home town and her photography course at Kyung Sung university to study Fine­ Arts in the French capital. Photography became part of her journey from one country to another: more than just an artistic medium, it became a milieu in which to lay her roots.

As the young artist “hovered” between two cultures, on the verge of adulthood, she put herself in front of the lens, placing herself simultaneously at the threshold of a new life and at the threshold of her own work. She started to combine self-portraits with digital collage techniques, revealing a remarkably poetic illustration of co-existence in an infinitely creative way. Her photographs were exhibited in Seoul, Paris and London as early as 2008.

Ten years after Ahn Sun Mi’s first self-portraits, the “Gong Zone” exhibition sheds new light on her work. Taking nature as its theme, this selection of ten photographs from 2007 to 2015, most of which were previously unseen, looks back at the artist’s growth.

The images include her camouflaged face (in “Guetteur”, 2007) and her eyes peeping out from behind a mask of leaves (“Timidité”, 2009), others where the photographer turns her body into a cocoon-like cactus (“Autoportrait”, 2012) and her skin into bark (“Variations”, 2012), then shows herself emerging – still asleep – from the earth (“Femme plante”, 2013) or as a bud as it transforms and rises up towards the sun’s rays that brings it to bloom (“Gong Zone” series, 2015).

As the metaphor of a woman-plant unfolds and opens up to the light, the poetry of co-existence is revealed. This notion of co-existence is translated by the term “Gong Zone” in Korean and comes across in all Ahn Sun Mi’s work in a game of discordance in which the artist stands between two worlds. Here she depicts herself in a new-found harmony between the subject and the world.

This exhibition comes as a counterpart to the more usual vision of the artist’s work – often featured in settings with a pop or surrealist feel that keep her, perhaps somewhat disdainfully, in the world of childhood, or otherwise in dark dreamlike compositions tinged with melancholy – instead revealing the intimate journey, from antagonism to conciliation, of the photographer and her work on the road to maturity.

However, here nature is not only a theme used to reinterpret Ahn Sun Mi’s work: it actually imposes itself as the very subject of the photographs, as a universal possession to which the artist pays tribute. “When I arrived in France, I was quite homesick for Korea,” remembers Ahn Sun Mi. “Nature was the only familiar presence and I took shelter in it, like a refuge. Over the years, it has continued to inspire me and I draw strength from it.”

“My work bears witness to the inseparable notions of nature and of being, characteristic to Korean culture,” she explains.

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