Kyungwoo Chun

Kyungwoo Chun, born in Korea in 1969 and now based in Germany, is known for his poetically blurred long exposure photographic portraits. Chun's last name means "thousand," and derives from a Chinese general who emigrated to Korea 407 years ago. For this project, Chun photographed thousands of people in China with his last name.

These exceptionally intense portraits, which sometimes take several hours to expose, are not character studies, nor do they seek to "portray" in the conventional sense of the word. The photographer and his subjects enter into a dialogue which, as Stephan Berg has observed, culminates in a picture "in which not only the photographer himself and the person photographed, but also the time they have spent together are superimposed." Kyungwoo Chun, a native of Seoul born in 1969, is focused--figuratively and perhaps literally--on the phenomenon of time and the ways in which we apprehend it. Time, for the artist, is "what we as individuals actually live," and "life is self-defined time."