The Korean artist Kyungwoo Chun questions self-image and blurs the line between imagination and representation in his famous series-performance Face of Face.
Photography: Kyungwoo Chun
Text: Kyungwoo Chun, Ligia Popławska

For the series ‘Face of Face’, Kyungwoo Chun invited young famous Korean actors for a performance in his studio. The artist positioned the participants in front of a desk with pencil and paper. The task of the participants was to close their eyes, to focus on their faces to portray themselves. During the performance, Chun photographed the participants with long-time exposure. The resulting portrait he then overlaid with the drawn self-portrait of the respective person. In the portraits, we see concentrated and completely absorbed people. The actors, who usually take on the roles of other people, were completely alone.

The artist explains: I’ve been paying attention that the young actors in the entertainment industry are confronted by different identities while they have less chance to be ordinary young people and consider about their real identity. In my work, they were free from playing a certain role of other fictitious person and at the same time had a possibility of dialogue to themselves through the imagination and act of drawing. I wanted to try to combine two faces of one person, which happened simultaneously and spontaneously. The mismatch of two images of the same person and two different media could allow a movement between two faces.