Independence Movement: Layered Gazes

On the blank spaces of memory, the past and present overlap

Solo Exhibition | Hakbong Kwon

Independence Movement: Layered Gazes

“Independence Movement: Layered Gazes” uses the figure of a girl symbolizing Yu Gwan‑sun to visually recall the traces of countless independence activists who disappeared without a name.
By placing a levitating figure above historical sites, it creates points where past and present, reality and unreality intersect.
This work does more than commemorate the past—it intends to function as a reflective question: How are we carrying on that spirit today?

  • Exhibition Period: August 7 (Thu) – August 31 (Sun), 2025
  • Venue: Gangdong Art Center, Art Gallery “Grim”

Last December, the imposition of martial law struck me deeply.
Until then, I believed Korea could waver under the power and threats of nations like China, the U.S., or Russia.
But the real threat turned out not to be external—it was internal, from corrupt power within.
That experience made me reevaluate the true roots and essence of the Republic of Korea.

The starting point was the March 1st Movement and the independence struggle.
The March 1, 1919 movement was a historic moment when our people declared their strong will for self‑rule to the world.
And with the founding of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea in Shanghai, democracy and national sovereignty were posed as core values.
The spirit and legacy of those independence movements have become the most fundamental roots shaping today’s Korean identity.

This work is created by re‑seeing historic sites of the independence movement from the present viewpoint.
The girl wearing the white jeogori and black skirt (uniform of Ewha Girls’ School) evokes Yu Gwan‑sun—but she is not one specific person.
She is a visual metaphor for all those nameless independence activists lost in the shadows of history.
Presented floating in midair—free from physical constraints—she bridges reality and unreality, past and present.
This image symbolizes that the spirit of past freedom fighters continues to live in our lives across time.

The spaces in which the girl gazes include not only historic places where independence was sought, but also places of suffering—such as Seodaemun Prison—and various other sites imbued with meaning.
I quietly examine how those places—where patriots risked their lives, endured pain, and made sacrifice—now exist with us in the present.
If they could see us today, what would they think? I want to pose that question.

What this work aims for goes beyond simply recording and remembering the past.
I hope it becomes a quiet question mark about who we are, how we live now, and what kind of future we must build.

In the future, I wish to document independence movement sites scattered throughout the nation and bind them into a unified narrative.
I also hope to extend this to the many traces of independence efforts abroad—so that “independence movement” becomes not merely a word confined to history, but a foundational question of the present and the starting point of reflection.

May 2025, Lampang
Hakbong Kwon

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

2025 IPA International Photography Awards – Fine Arts (Abstract) Honorable Mention
2025 IPA Officially Selected Work (Professional Category)
2025 MonoVisions Awards – Conceptual Honorable Mention
2025 PX3 Paris International Photography Awards
 • First Place, Fine Arts Division
 • Gold Winner – The Independence Movement: Layered Gazes

With sincere thanks to all who took part in making this project possible.