By skyforbes 
By Tseng Che-Wei & Huang Yi-Hsuan
(The original Chinese version of this article was published on Ocula Chinese WeChat Official Account.)
This year marks the twelfth edition of Title Match ①, an annual exhibition organized by the Buk-Seoul Museum of Art since its opening in 2013 ②. Curated by in-house curator Yoo Eun-soon, the present exhibition takes its theme from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s absolute political proposition in The Social Contract: “NO MIDDLE GROUND” ③. It features artist Hong Jin-hwon alongside the art collective YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, exploring how art can become a medium for catalyzing political debate.
In this exhibition emphasizing dynamic divergence beyond binary opposition, Hong’s opening question — “Can a photograph awaken the world like a coup does? ④” — resonates with particular urgency following South Korea’s 2024 martial law incident, directly addressing the complex relationship between viewing and political perception in our contemporary moment.
In 2009, as a photojournalist covering the “Yongsan Tragedy ⑤” — a forced eviction in Seoul’s Yongsan District that sparked a fire, killing six people — Hong suddenly recognized the undeniable disconnect between photograph and reality. He became acutely aware of how photographs are selected, disseminated, and transformed in contemporary society, their interpretive authority no longer controlled by the photographer but autonomously determined by viewers. Following this realization, he resigned from journalism to explore, as an artist, the production mechanisms and interpretive structures underlying photographic meaning.
This exhibition presents six works, including nearly three hours of video and over a hundred photographs, transforming the gallery into a disorienting ocean of images. Random Forest 2025 features photographs of varying sizes, unframed and neatly arranged on the walls — encompassing Hong’s past documentation of social movements alongside other open-source photographs ⑥. Juxtaposed without chronological or thematic order, these images are highlighted as what Hong calls “a mode of human existence,” permeating life, cognition, and ethical relations. These deliberately decontextualized photographs expose contemporary audiences’ passive media literacy habits: comfortable with pre-packaged narrative content while having lost their own analytical capacity to digest images.
This informational anxiety pervading the exhibition space finds partial relief only upon consulting the accompanying Random Forest 2025 — Index Book (2025). More than an illustration guide, it contains Hong’s lengthy confession reflecting on his photojournalism career. He argues that neither compositional framing nor optical ratios matter as much as how viewers read and extract their own desires. A photograph’s power emerges not from the act of shooting but is reconstructed through viewing and listening: “We must become the audience. ⑦”
The remaining video works, through cross-regional and cross-cultural montage, outline the implicit narrative formation of “events,” revealing aspects that have been reduced, excluded, or deferred in historical writing. Undocumented Mona Lisa (2025) cross-cuts between Dorothea Lange’s famous Migrant Mother portrait from America’s Great Depression and the Yoon Geum-i murder case, a 1992 killing of a Korean sex worker by U.S. military personnel ⑧, exploring the contradictions of photographic ethics. If “a photograph can indeed awaken the world,” does the subject’s privacy still have autonomous voice within social transformation? The words of Florence Owens Thompson, called “the Mona Lisa of the 1930s,” remain thought-provoking thirty years later: “I wish she [Lange] hadn’t taken my picture.”
Ektachrome is Processed Every Friday (2025) ⑨ connects the red-light district of Yongju-gol in Paju City, formed around U.S. military bases in Korea, with nuclear memories from Nevada, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, repeatedly dialecticizing the (im)possibility of photographs becoming “events.” Through double exposures and fragmented narratives, the work guides viewers to witness moments of historical formation in the gaps between frames. Using developing techniques as metaphor, history, like photographic color shifts, distorts with spectral displacement and continues to operate — in the same way that Yongju-gol did not disappear after U.S. military withdrawal. When the atomic bomb fell, the instantaneous flash outpaced the reaction speed of the film used to capture it; the photograph could not form, and the event vanished with it.
Double Slit (2023) looks back at a 2004 incident at Hyundai Heavy Industries in which a worker immolated himself, retelling an obscured historical wound through poetic imagery and split-frame design. Through interviews with two eyewitnesses — a former subcontractor union president and a folk singer who supported the action — juxtaposed with images of their current lives, it shows how once-radical ideals dissipate into private memory and internal echoes over time. Through divided visual composition, Hong makes audiences feel the politics of splitting in connected and opposed visual experiences: not just the rift between labor and capital, but gaps between ideal and reality, resistance and compromise. Twenty years later, the work reflects how capitalism dissolves revolution’s collective vocabulary, gradually teaching people to substitute submission for resistance through institutional erosion. When former revolutionaries become poets and children’s songwriters, it is because the flames of struggle have long cooled under rigid systems. Only the images still attempt to ask: within capital’s pervasive logic, can human existence still escape the fate of co-optation?
The Choral (2025) centers on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony performed at Hitler’s 56th birthday concert, interspersed with archival footage of Korean police union protests. It depicts how music is reinterpreted and appropriated across different eras, becoming an ideological vehicle, which parallels the semantic drift of images, constantly migrating and mutating like historical specters, always accompanying us. At the video’s conclusion, the narration poetically states: “The ghost is nowhere yet everywhere, may it never find solid ground,” seeming to gently echo the curatorial theme of “no middle ground.”
When people assume photography records “events,” breaking existing orders and catalyzing social change, Hong’s complex, interwoven narrative incorporates viewers into positions of interpretive responsibility. He restores photographs to networks of ongoing influence, engaging ethics and politics. Though his juxtaposed events may not withstand strict historical scrutiny, they precisely embody that intermediate realm where only “art” can linger — following not just argumentative logic but maintaining an ethics that hesitates between photograph and reality.
① The “TITLE MATCH” program adopts a quasi-dual exhibition format, inviting two groups of artists whose creative themes resonate with each other and are recognized as influential, to exhibit on separate floors, creating a sense of competitive sparring. This article focuses on South Korean artist Hong Jin-hwon’s exhibition in the 2025 “TITLE MATCH.”
② In 2013, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) and Buk-Seoul Museum of Art (Buk-SeMA) successively opened, marking the official entry of public art institutions into Seoul’s core districts. The same year also saw the establishment of the independent Audio Visual Pavilion, making 2013 widely regarded as a watershed year for Seoul’s contemporary art development.
③ Seoul Museum of Art. (2025). 2025 Title Match: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries vs. Hong Jin-hwon: No Middle Ground. Seoul Museum of Art. https://sema.seoul.go.kr/en/whatson/exhibition/detail?exNo=1432110
④ The original Korean question “사진은 내란만큼 세계를 각성할 수 있는가?” uses “사진” meaning “photograph,” hence translated as “photograph” rather than “image” or “photography” to correspond with the original’s reference to specific visual media.
⑤ Sun Qiongli. (February 3, 2009). Seoul Yongsan District’s High Light Illuminates the Path: Facing the New Dictatorship of Urban Renewal. Coolloud. https://www.coolloud.org.tw/node/34717
⑥ Hong’s interest in open-source materials can be traced through his ongoing practice. He previously created the website “destroy.codes” (now closed), which allowed anonymous users to upload, subscribe to, and view content, critiquing algorithmic control over media literacy.
⑦Hong Jin-hwon states in Random Forest 2025 — Index Book (2025): “Here, again, we find a similar truism as in other political photographs: the political power of photographs lies not in the act of taking them, but in the act of looking at them.”
⑧Lee, M. M. O. (2021, Spring). The U.S. military’s long history of anti-Asian dehumanization. Korean Quarterly. https://www.koreanquarterly.org/tag/yun-geum-i/
⑨Ektachrome was a color reversal film introduced by Kodak in the 1940s, known for its strong color contrast, high resolution, and rich tonal range. It was widely used in military documentation, news photography, and official archival imaging.