To Independence Movement: Layered Gazes by Hakbong Kwon

– The One Who Rises, The One Not Yet Arrived –

Between sky and earth, a woman hovers.
She does not fly.
She does not arrive.
She only floats—
As though waiting, as though witnessing.
On Seoul asphalt, fields in Chungcheong, lost homesteads,
Silence‑bearing monuments, she lifts her form.
Her levitation is not mere performance.
It is a question cast upon the boundaries of time and space we inhabit.

Kwon Hakbong’s photographic series Independence Movement: Layered Gazes overlays existence and time, memory and ethics, body and nation in one frame—using extreme restraint through the devices of a historical location and a levitating figure.

The artist’s gaze does not merely seek to record the past.
He summons those unsaid, unremembered on the margins of forgetting, into today’s landscape.
Though the girl wears the uniform of Ewha Girls’ School, she is not Yu Gwan‑sun.
She is everyone, and at once no one.
She is the lost names, the buried voices, the slumbering ethics within us.
Her levitation is not a mystified leap, but a condition of belonging nowhere, a failed return, an incomplete presence, and a body briefly emerging as a waking question through the cracks of history.

The spaces in the photographs feel familiar yet strange.
Tapgol Park, Seodaemun Prison, the birthplace of Yu Gwan‑sun, Byeongcheon Five-Day Market, the central Temple of Cheondogyo, the old site of Yusimdang in Bukchon, back alleys of markets, shadowed urban corners, unremarkable alleyways beneath signboards.
These sites, boxed under the name “past,” dwell silently in today’s scenery, holding the stratigraphy of time.
The floating presence asks:
“Where was I?”
“For whom do I now stand?”
“Are we still in the process of independence?”
The photographs say nothing.
Yet the viewer feels stirring resonance in the silence.
This is a refined philosophical resistance to how forgetting is repeated, how memory becomes politicized and institutionalized and exiled from the realm of thought—and how a single photograph resists that, reopening space for reflection.

Rendered in black and white, scenes appear documentary—but in fact face our ethics in this present moment.
The light cast upon her body seems to originate from within, as though her being reveals itself.
Her surroundings are dim or blurred; she alone stands clear.
This is not turn toward protagonist but a quiet inevitability—a response to the world.

These photographs do not exalt memories of independence.
Rather, they ask:
Is memory alive?
Do we carry its spirit?
Is history not simply past events, but a “present task” still mediated through me?
Independence Movement: Layered Gazes is not a commemorative exhibition.
It is an ethical call, a response of existence.
Her levitating body is testimony of this age and the final outcry of the disappeared.

In the end, she will land.
But where?
That landing is not yet determined.
It may be shaped by how we remember, how we live, how we look.
That question still rests beneath each of our feet.

The reason Kwon Hakbong’s layered gaze wounds us so sharply—like shattered glass—is here.

Honghee Kim / Photographer