Park Chan-wook's photography exhibition brings a different side of the director into focus

Park Chan-wook, the Korean auteur of “Oldboy” (2003) and “Decision to Leave” (2022), is showing his photographs in Europe for the first time — not in a cinematheque but in a 16th-century hotel in Arles, France. The exhibition of Park’s photography runs at Lee Ufan Arles until Oct. 4, drawing on images the director has made over the past 15 years.

The exhibition, “On a Quiet Morning,” curated by Valerie Duponchelle, an art critic and editor at the French publication Le Figaro who first met Park in 2014, belongs to the associated program of the Rencontres d’Arles, a summer photography festival, and is timed to the 140th anniversary of Korean-French diplomatic relations. It is also the first time Park’s photographs have been exhibited outside Korea.

What hangs at Lee Ufan Arles, a museum named after the Korean painter inside the historic Hotel Vernon, is not what Park’s film audiences would expect. A minke whale laid out on a blue tarpaulin at a fishing port, a truck bed of crushed ice behind it. A cluster of closed patio umbrellas that looks, in black and white, as a small crowd of ghosts. A tarpaulin-covered machine parked in the gap between two houses in Paju, photographed over several months at different hours and from different angles.

Park does not retouch his photos nor does he alter the light, and he also does not manipulate the image before or after.

“Everything I photograph is mundane, even humble,” Park said in a press release on the Arles exhibition that opened earlier this month.

What changes is the moment: the season, the weather, whether the air is clear. Everything can change within minutes.

The contrast with Park’s films is the show’s argument. Park storyboards every shot for his films before a shoot. But his photographs are made in the free hours during filming, without a brief and without a subject decided in advance. People rarely appear in them, and when they do, they belong to the landscape rather than to a cast. Some of the images were taken on his own sets — a wall blocking the sea during the filming of “Decision to Leave,” actor Kim Tae-ri on “The Handmaiden” (2016) — but they sit off to the side of the work, unusable by it.

Park appeared at the Theatre Antique on July 9, at the Rencontres d’Arles’ invitation, to talk about the image and the suspension of time. A catalog from L’Artiere, an independent publishing house, accompanies the exhibition, with essays by Duponchelle and by Lee Schulman of The Anonymous Project.

Lee Ufan Arles, open since 2022 and the third venue devoted to the artist after Naoshima, Japan, and Busan, runs 30-minute tours daily at 10:30 a.m.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]