YOUTH CODE!
Photography · Exhibition · Seoul / New York / Zurich
Jun Ahn
Self-portraits from the edges of skyscrapers. A performance without an audience. And an exhibition about why we cannot stop photographing the age that escapes us.
Why this conversation
I saw Jun Ahn's work for the first time at Christophe Guye Galerie in Zurich, in a group exhibition called The Youth Code! curated by Nathalie Herschdorfer, the former curator of the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne. The show brought together eleven photographers from Switzerland, Korea, the United States, France, Australia, Russia, Canada and Germany, all circling the same question: why are images of youth so ubiquitous, and what happens when the camera turns that gaze into art? Ahn's self-portraits pop right out of the walls. She sits on the edges of buildings and photographs herself looking down. The vertigo is not metaphorical.
A performance without an audience. An end of youth. A coming to terms with the future.
Jun Ahn on the Self-Portrait seriesThe Artist
Jun Ahn was born in South Korea in 1981 and moved to the United States to study, graduating from the University of Southern California with a degree in art history in 2006, followed by two years of postgraduate photography at the Pratt Institute. While at Pratt she began the Self-Portrait project, which she regards as "a performance without an audience," an end of youth, and a coming to terms with the future.
The series began in 2008 while she was living in New York. Remembering adolescent anxieties and sensing that her childhood was coming to an end, she started photographing herself on the edges of tall buildings, challenging her own fears while presenting viewers with a visual and psychological void, an otherwise-unseen space where "optical perception conflicts with spatial perception." She has noted the contradiction of urban dwellers living in skyscrapers for the view while many simultaneously feel vertigo when confronting that same horizon from the edge.
Researching buildings that had personal resonance, she took on the laborious process of obtaining permission to make work in these locations. Using timed captures with a digital camera on a tripod, she moved within the space until the memory card was full, later selecting the images that best reflect a calm demeanour within the vertiginous environment. She was selected as one of the British Journal of Photography's 20 Photographers to Watch in 2013. Parsons awarded her a Master of Fine Arts with honours in 2012, following which she enrolled in a PhD programme in photography at Hongik University in Seoul.
The Youth Code!
The exhibition was conceived by Nathalie Herschdorfer as a travelling museum show, with the Christophe Guye Galerie presentation as an exclusive preview. The premise: photographs of young people by art photographers have become so prominent that one can almost speak of an independent photographic genre. In the field of photography, the representation of adolescence really took off in the second half of the twentieth century with the work of American precursors like "Kids" film director Larry Clark.
The show does not try to present a generic portrait of adolescence. Instead it brings together work around these central themes: youths as a social group distinct from both children and adults, adolescence as a particularly tormented stage, and the self-presentation emblematic of internet culture. Neither children nor adults, teenagers are often androgynous, rejecting their past, dreaming of the future, and searching for a meaningful sense of self. With the predominance of the digital image, the camera has become an everyday object among young people. And yet so many images seek to decipher an age that escapes us, or which even escaped us when we were still teenagers ourselves.
The Artists
- Anoush Abrar
- Jun Ahn
- Mike Brodie
- Denis Darzacq
- Lucas Foglia
- Martine Fougeron
- Bill Henson
- Ina Jang
- Margo Ovcharenko
- Guillaume Simoneau
- Sascha Weidner
Find
- Gallery: christopheguye.com
- Curator: Nathalie Herschdorfer, former curator of the Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne
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Youth Code! Christophe Guye Gallery
Youth Code! Christophe Guye Gallery
