Sung Soo Koo Photogenic Drawings

Sung Soo Koo (*1970 in Daegu, South Korea) became known through his series Magical Reality, which features candy-colored scenes from his Asian homeland: an advertiser‘s model of the Statue of Liberty on top of the roof of a hotel, or the plush interior of a wedding chapel. He contrasts this pseudo-American plastic world with delicate portraits of flowers from hisPhotogenic Drawings, which take up Asian tradition.Some of the plants, many of them dug up complete with root system, are artfully arranged and photographed by the artist in a strictly formal manner between two glass plates. A second group is pressed into damp clay, and the resulting bas-reliefs are later cast in cement, creating a positive print, which he then paints in meticulous detail and photographs. What therefore looks natural at first glance actually turns out to have been subjected to the strictest control or has become an entirely artificial product.