Captured Nature

Bak Hyongryol (1980)

Temporary land interventions exposing human efforts to control and commodify nature. Satirical visual critique addressing capitalist land exploitation through symbolic acts and geometric compositions.

Description

In Hyongryol Bak’s photographic series Captured Nature (2010–2012), the artist explores the transient relationship between humans and the natural world through ephemeral interventions captured in photographic form across diverse Korean landscapes. Created during a period of rapid urban expansion and technological advancement, this series critically addresses the shifting human perception of nature, emphasizing the transition from coexistence to domination and commodification.

Bak's work critically examines the capitalist drive to quantify, own, and control natural environments. Through performative actions—such as pulling trees with threads, bundling snow with twine, and carving Korean land measurement units ("pyeong") directly into the earth—Bak underscores the paradox and futility inherent in attempting to possess something fundamentally impermanent. His interventions question the urban mentality that perceives nature solely through the lenses of utility, property, and development.

Artistically, Captured Nature merges elements of performance, land art, and photography. Bak often composes scenes with careful attention to geometry, line, and symmetry, employing both monochromatic and color schemes to highlight contrasts between natural forms and imposed human structures. Utilizing transparent acrylic sheets in primary urban colors or threads strategically arranged across open ground, Bak constructs images that visually juxtapose human artificiality against the organic unpredictability of nature.

Captured Nature debuted in solo shows at Gallery On, Seoul (2011) and SongEun ArtCube (2013), and appeared in the group exhibition What Do You Think About Nature? (Paris, 2011). The series received major recognition with the Daum Prize (2015), the ILWOO Photography Award (2019), and Sungkok’s Artist for Tomorrow (2022). Its position was further consolidated by the monograph Unseen Land (IANN, 2019) and a decade survey at the Sungkok Art Museum (2022).

Behind the work

After photographing the interventions, Bak ensures the ground is returned to its original state, removing any materials like threads and filling in dug areas. This temporary approach echoes land art practices from the 1960s and 1970s.

For Captured Nature – Sea #2, Bak installed transparent acrylic sheets on a beach, using the primary urban colours: cyan, magenta, and yellow. These were arranged to create a perspective that positioned a person looking through the yellow sheet as the focal point, reducing the sea to an object seen from a human-centric view.

The piece Captured Nature – Earth #9 involved the act of carving numerals directly into the surface of the land. Each number was specifically designed to have an area of exactly 3.3 square metres, which is the equivalent of a Korean land measurement unit known as a pyeong. This action critiques the human tendency to reduce land to quantifiable units for possession.

Bak intentionally chooses to work on easily accessible but often ignored "waste ground" or "untouched land" that is neither picturesque nor landscaped. He is interested in these sites precisely because they exist outside of the "development logic and utility value" that typically dictates how humans perceive and interact with land.

In one specific image, Captured Nature – Tree #4, two figures are shown pulling on a single tree with black and white threads. Bak states this visualises the "vain competitive desire to capture and control nature".

Hyongryol Bak meticulously revisits each site multiple times before beginning his interventions, studying not only the land’s physical characteristics but also how varying light conditions—its direction and intensity—alter the ground's appearance, a factor he consciously integrates into his photographic process.

Quotes by the photographer

"Nature reveals great variety in tens of thousands of changes every day, but the human perspective ignores such diversity, viewing and judging it as simple and uniform. What if we did not just look at the nature, but rather took the time to listen to it?"

"I value experience and observation in art. Living in the city, I saw an ironic relationship in the attitudes of people towards nature. My work began with a series of projects in which I chose a natural environment and somehow attempted to conquer or possess it. (As if such a thing were possible.)"

"Since these actions are temporary and the ground is reinstated afterwards, the photograph functions, as with many types of land art, as a record – the evidence of an action. It is ‘indexical’ – it points to an action when the action itself is no longer available – while itself becoming a contemporary art image."

"I do not consider the temporary intervention on the land as the only object of my work but seek to maintain a lasting relationship with it through the photograph."

"Philosophically, my creative process is closer to Goethe’s approach to ecology which emphasised intuition and imagination. I ‘empathise’ with the land by touching its texture and experiencing its ever-changing nature."

"By continuously observing and experiencing nature, we become aware of its diversity and expansiveness. We realise that it is foolish to try to define it in taxonomic terms."

"Nature, of course, cannot speak. But, if it could tell a story, it would be about the important difference between the flow of time in nature and that perceived by humans, and the confusion that arises from randomly mixing up the two."

Tags and context

Credits: Alasdair Foster, Talking Pictures (project nomination). Suggest an Edit