Not long after the exhibition Things from an Impossible Point ended, I had a portfolio review at a gallery in Korea. I had long been deeply interested in exhibiting abroad, and I wanted to find out whether Relationships had the potential to reach audiences across borders and cultural contexts.
During the development of the work, I had already met two excellent mentors, photographers Kim Sung-soo and Kim Seung-gu, and learned a great deal from them. Still, I think I wanted to hear another perspective on the feedback I had received and on my own potential. I paid a considerable fee for the review and received various pieces of advice. I no longer remember most of what was said clearly, but one comment stayed with me for a long time.
“You can’t reach an international audience with such a personal subject. The work needs to engage with broader social and humanistic ideas and communicate a message to society as a whole.”
I understood this to mean that Relationships was too personal to cross cultural and national boundaries. Having only just completed my first group exhibition, I was shaken by the comment and spent a great deal of time thinking about it before regaining confidence in my work through Fujifilm Photo Festa. This experience also became one of the reasons I later began Encounters, the second chapter of the Connections Trilogy.
Even so, one thing was clear. I did not want to abandon my own story or transform Relationships into a different kind of work simply to make it more suitable for international audiences. In the end, I decided not to become fixated on taking the first chapter abroad. I left the work as it was and began the second chapter.
About a year later, a gallery in Russia contacted me through social media. They asked to see my work, and I showed them Relationships exactly as it was. In a way I had never anticipated, this led to my first invited solo exhibition abroad.
It was the first time Relationships was presented to an international audience, and the exhibition was also featured by local media. A work I had once thought might be too personal to cross borders was now meeting audiences in another country without giving up the personal story at its core.
Looking back, I do not think the portfolio review was necessarily wrong. Perhaps the point was that a personal story needs sufficient context and strength if it is to reach audiences from different cultural backgrounds. But rather than reducing its personal nature, Relationships took the opposite path and pushed further into specificity.
Through this experience, I realized for the first time that a personal story does not necessarily have to become more universal in order to expand beyond itself. I learned that when a work is developed with enough specificity and completed in a way that is distinctly its own, that very uniqueness can become what allows it to reach others.
I later received an invitation from the gallery for a second solo exhibition. I am currently considering an appropriate time for it alongside my other international exhibition commitments.