I participated in Seoul Publishers Table 2025, where I presented a dummy book and calendar of Relationships. I was reunited with artists Kyungmin In and Wonho Lee, with whom I had previously exhibited in Things from an Impossible Point, and we introduced our respective publications.
The idea for the Relationships dummy book began with a request from a visitor I met at Sangsangmadang Gallery. After seeing Relationships, the visitor asked whether there was a book or another format that would allow them to keep the experience. At the time, the exhibited works were approximately 1.2 meters in size, which made them relatively difficult for a typical household to own in terms of both price and display space.
I began thinking about how the work could be made easier to own while still conveying as much as possible of the sense of scale and image density found in the original prints. The medium I chose was the photobook. I needed a balance that would allow the images to be shown at a meaningful size while remaining practical to transport and store. The quality of the paper, the number of copies produced, and the price also had to remain at a level that would make ownership possible not only for dedicated collectors, but also for viewers who simply cared deeply about the work.
The first dummy edition of Relationships was produced in a run of 30 copies. Most were purchased by visitors who had seen the work at the first exhibition, while a few were given to teachers as a gesture of gratitude. Nearly the entire edition was naturally taken up within a short period of time.
I also produced a calendar, thinking that even a photobook might still feel inaccessible to some people. Interestingly, some buyers said they felt it was too precious to write on. Instead, they used the pages like posters, cut out favorite images to place in their own frames, or hung them near their doors to enjoy in everyday life.
Through this, I felt that I had at least partially achieved my original goal: allowing people to keep the emotion and memory of an exhibition with them for longer, in a form that could become part of everyday life.
The first dummy book also became the starting point for developing my own format for archiving and preserving photographic work. In later exhibitions, this evolved into a practice of organizing the work in a publication closer to an exhibition catalogue and making it available to audiences.