Lot Essay
Ryu Jung Min's eloquent comprehension of Pictorialism is clear in her soft yet graphic focus to create a romantic reproduction of nature; a photographic language that is balanced with the delicate aesthetics of eastern ink painting under her artistic sensibility. Ryu's tools for creation may be utterly mechanical and modern but her practice is traditionally attentive; she assembles three thousand photographs and harmonizes them in unity under her meticulous digital brushworks of Photoshop. For Ryu, 'The Path of Error' has two meanings: to lose the path; and to lose direction in life. Photography defamiliarizes daily life through controlled space and time. Everyday life in my photograph is like a cross-section of reproduced life, static between reality and fiction, reality and unreality.' Constructing roads of horizontal rolling slopes of snow, crossing each other, winding down or upwards in erratic pictorial shifts exude a sense of expressive spontaneity that oriental ink painting illustrated, with obvious symbolism for the unpredictable journey of life. By presenting multiple perspectives, Ryu stirs an atmospheric expansion of space to her vertical axis frame, deliberately disregarding a central focal point to emphasize the diverse aspects of life that come with surprising off course but all in nature, is merely a path of life.