"THE GUILTY"
June 25, 2013
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Description
Guilt is the subject of interrogation and contemplation in Ji Hyun Kwon’s work. Her arresting portraits of The Guilt show individuals of different cultural and geographical background, who have written onto their faces the reasons for their personal feelings of guilt. Encoded in their perspective mother tongue, “guilt” is revealed in its culturally specific as well as its universal complexity. Kwon’s interest in the subject is not only indebted to her past studies in criminal law before turning to photography. Nurtured by entrenched feelings of human compassion and moral consciousness, her profound sense of social duty, responsibility and obligation in life is informed by an Aristotelian understanding of the human being as a communal being who may find his ultimate self-fulfillment as a constitutive element of society. In her engagement with art, the “eternal sense of guilt” is not only what “pushes (her) heart from the deepest inside”, says Kwon, it is what she achieves to bring to the visible surface of her portrayed subjects. Finding that we are not alone with the burdens of what we believe to be our wrongdoings, these portraits allow us, cautiously and yet straightforwardly, to return their gaze.
