Better Days
While L.S. Lowry was still studying art at night class, his parents came into financial difficulty. They moved from their home in a leafy suburb of Manchester to an industrial town on the outskirts of the city. At first, he detested his new environment, dominated by ominous factories and tall chimneys spewing smoke. But it would later become an obsession—the subject for which the English painter is best known, recreating urban panoramas densely populated with his characteristic “matchstick men”.
Lowry’s change of heart followed a revelation—a thunderbolt moment that he didn’t ascribe to any particular dramatic event. Rather, it was a sudden realisation; an abrupt refocus, as if looking at his surroundings for the first time. He’d missed his train out of Pendlebury, the town he’d done his best to ignore for the past seven years. “And as I left the station, I saw the Acme Spinning Company’s mill …,” Lowry later recalled. “The huge black framework of rows of yellow-lit windows standing up against the sad, damp charged afternoon sky. The mill was turning out… I watched this scene – which I’d looked at many times without seeing – with rapture…”
He was, arguably, the last Impressionist, born into the world’s first industrial city. And when he died, in 1976, there was an outpouring of appreciation for a painter who had chosen to give factory architecture and working-class city life the artistic recognition that it deserved. I was seven years old when he passed away, and Lowry’s paintings were the first artworks to have any impact on me. Now, looking at the photographs of Seunggu Kim, I am immediately reminded of them, with their birds-eye view, and their clusters of seemingly anonymous humans going about their lives, dwarfed by their surroundings.
To my eye, living on the other side of the world, many of the scenes that Kim records are as bizarre as they are extraordinary. There are the blasé festival-goers who seem oblivious to the presence of a giant pink bear (‘Bellygom’—I had to Google it…) dominating Gwanghwamun Plaza in central Seoul. In another photograph, we look down upon a humble driving school that has been landscaped as high ornament. In another, we see a grid of mathematical perfection in the neat rows of brightly-coloured tents atop a frozen river at the Pyeongchang Trout Festival. And in nearly all the pictures, people share space with eerie harmony—giving each other such uniform space that I find myself wondering if I’m the subject of an elaborate prank; the victim of some epic Photoshop hoax.
I wonder if Koreans have the same sense of the strange and the familiar when they look at Kim’s pictures? Are these scenes so commonplace? Or do his epic photographs make them look anew? Much of what we see can be found the world over. There are daytrippers posing for Insta moments in front of photo opportunities designed to lure them into nearby shops. There are neon-bibbed amateur sports enthusiasts gathering on barren, out-of-the-way pitches overlooked by cooling towers. There are odd festivals celebrating local customs and seasonal produce. There are carefully choreographed encounters with nature.
What is remarkable about Kim’s panoramas is the consistency of his elevated point of view, rendering people and places as architectural models. In the complex networks of pathways and boundaries, we see how we are shaped by our environment. He draws our attention to the outer edges to show us the workings of things. And in many of the pictures, the spectacle itself is absent, or peripheral. At a cherry blossom festival in Gwangmyeong, we see crowds converging from all directions upon a small amphitheatre. Yet we are presented with a rear view of the stage facade and a cluster of service tents, the nearest of which opens to reveal bored security staff sat around a table, indifferent to the focus of everyone else’s attention.
We see a social landscape of many layers. One such, perhaps the most evident, is the particular character of South Korean life, what Kim calls the “social ironies” resulting from the country’s rapid economic growth. People work long hours and get precious short holidays, so much of their recreation is focused on experiences close to the Seoul Capital Area, home to half of its population. And while scenes of ant-like figures streaming through fields of blooming azalea will appear dystopian to some, to Kim they are a sign of Koreans’ optimism. Everywhere teems with life. And if you look close enough, human encounters reveal themselves. A father and child kick a ball in front of a fenced-off area (that hides some strange, unknown excavations) close to a packed camping site. A man wheels an elderly woman around picturesque tulip fields. This is the city putting on its best show, revealing the aspirations of its inhabitants. Fun is being had. Memories are being made. And the elevated viewpoint lends the ordinary an heroic quality.
The natural world is a more troubling presence in these photographs. So many of the scenes of recreation we see in Kim’s panoramas refer to nature, presenting a staged-managed version that is a reassuring spectacle of what has been lost. Here, nature is almost entirely man-made, created purely for our consumption. Never has Guy Debord’s 1967 book, The Society of the Spectacle, seemed so prescient. “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles,” he wrote. “Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”
Despite the evident organisation and mutual goodwill of South Korean society there is a sense of fragile balance. In years to come, I wonder if Better Days will be seen as a portrait of the past, the present or the future? Are we looking at a model of late capitalist productivity? Is this a warning? Or perhaps Kim senses that another seismic change is on its way with the emergence of new technologies that take us further away from these in-person human encounters, just as the Lowry captured the end days of manufacturing in Manchester, anticipating the post-industrial era.
By Simon Bainbridge