“I focused on expressing the depths of human emotion and inner psyche through my work.”
—Byung-Hun Min
As one of South Korea’s most established image-makers, Byung-Hun Min (b.1955) is renowned for his highly emotive photographs that highlight the transience of our world. MG247, 2010, offered here, is part of his 2007-13 series on nudes for which the artist chose ordinary people to pose for him, wanting to capture ‘the informal, genuine, and natural feel’ of his subjects. Here, a minimalist image is achieved by seamlessly setting the sensual lines of the woman’s back against an enveloping charcoal-grey background. Like many of the figures in the series, the unidentifiable subject, turned away from the viewer, becomes almost abstracted as she blends into her foggy surroundings, heightened through Min’s blunt cropping of the image. So that each work may appear shrouded in a delicate veil of mist, the most laborious stage of his image-making process occurs in the darkroom where he works exclusively in analogue to produce the velvety finish of his distinctive monochromic images. Min’s works have been widely exhibited and reside in a number of institutions, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, the Santa Barbara Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.