Published by Hatje Cantz. Text by Suejin Shin, et al.
Korean photographer Sung Soo Koo (born 1970) is best known for his series Magical Reality, which features candy-colored scenes from his homeland: an advertiser’s model of the Statue of Liberty on the roof of a hotel, or the plush interior of a wedding chapel. In contrast, his newest series deals with the natural world--or seems to at first glance. To create the botanical photographs in Photogenic Drawings, Koo began by uprooting whole plants such as delicate flowers and ferns. He then either flattened them between glass plates to photograph them, or pressed them into damp clay to make molds out of them, casting perfect replicas of the plants in cement. Koo meticulously painted these replicas and photographed them, lending the illusion of naturalness to an object that is in fact entirely artificial and is the product of absolute control.
