Hey, Hot Shot! Contender: Park Ho Sang

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HOWON-DONG digital c-print, 2004, 60" X 50", by HHS entrant Park Ho Sang

Sometimes, when I am using Google maps to find directions, I enter extra addresses, just to see what the street views look like. Park Ho Sang's aerial shots are what I dream of finding on Google. His work is fantastic; un-exaggerated realities that caused me to look at the screen, foolishly, for a button I could use to zoom in.

Sang explains:

The objects I photographed is a small park located within a living space in downtown. I paid attention to images seen from a bird's-eye view and proceed working on them. While working, I focused on not relating special stories to them but presenting spaces. I think that the pictures presented that way can be a pathway to remind viewers of their thoughts on familiar places. In particular, their thought or discussions regarding parks. The parks seen here and the details taken of bird's eye view will reflect characteristics of downtown area and distorted realities. In addition, I also presume that they will also reveal fabricated Korean-style space and stark realities of democracy in a more comic way. These parks are that of fragmented space intended as patronizing and face-saving move, a park that mimics real parks and a place intended to be used as a park. That case is an outcome of scars of Korean-style capitalism, simulacra. Every apartment complex decorates the park and is adorned with playgrounds and strange-looking installments, the place created along with green areas of land demonstrates coarse, improvised landscape architecture, an artificial scenery. I captured such interesting, but strange-looking, scenes.