The Text Book (Chulsoo & Younghee)
May 6 – 30, 2010
Korean textbooks are full of didactic images meant to educate children. But, in reality, for some reason our childhoods were filled with strange and shocking images. And those images somehow appear regularly in our everyday lives and affect us for the rest of our lives. People with strange memories from their childhood and I, a photographer, wore doll masks of the main characters, Chulsoo and Younghee, who appear in these elementary textbooks and we tried to recreate emotional moments from our past. And these emotional moments were in turn recreated into the textbook that remains in the memories of young Koreans who attended elementary school from the start of the 1970s to the mid-1990s.
The story of Chulsoo and Younghee that appeared in our elementary textbooks is about the memories from our youth and these memories have great influence over our lives even now. It is difficult to identify why we continue to be influenced by those memories, what their true nature is, and what their underlying causes are. There are still so many times when we still do not know how to dispel these memories, what the solution is, and what the answer is. As a result, we torture ourselves over them, try to conceal them from others and are tormented by them. What is more, there isn’t an instruction manual that can be found from which we can refer to in order to overcome it, and therefore, we cannot even imagine that the reason and solutions to those incidents are close at hand. The sad reality is that from the memories that they hold within their hearts, many people suffer from humiliation, guilt, trauma, shock, and stress from which they cannot easily escape from. A possible solution for this lies within an education (not just education taught at schools but also overall social education and instruction) that is based on deep understanding and consideration for people. Also, going beyond the structural violence and typical way of narrow-minded thinking, there is need for wide range of alternative philosophy and attention. All the images in this text book (Chulsoo & Younghee) are the collection of ills that we as Koreans, and as humans, have suffered, are suffering and will suffer in the future. These images are also a personal analysis of the Korean society from the past to the present that was done in order to overcome this collection of ills. Lastly, these images are a counterproposal that passionately calls out to counterattack society.
Suk Kuhn Oh was born in Inchon, South Korea. After serving as a photographer in the Korean army, he received a degree in photography from the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University in England. His work has been exhibited in the UK, South Korea, Australia, and the US, and is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Ilmin Museum, Seoul.