Poorly Exposed VI (Namsan)

Selected photographs, 2019

The topographic character of Seoul gives the city's urbanism a penchant towards the quaint and bordered, constantly scribbled pathways of concrete and towers wound between the mountainous estuaries the Korean peninsula's tangled landscape. Namsan Park, arguably occupying the most central area of Seoul's contemporary form, exemplifies this condition in its most ideal state. Steps from the city's most cacophonous streets, one finds oneself lost along an undulating hillside that beguiles the expected passage around the city. In a series of often unexpected, panoramic vantages back over the urbanity all around, one is constantly taken aback by the distortion that nature exerts on distance, by the way that greenery and the sound of birds warp our perception of time and place.

Standing on a hill and looking down at the jumble of alleyways and shops and tiny apartments below, the rumbling of Seoul reached the mountainside and ruffled through the leaves and brush. It felt like the recurring fever dream of this city in which I’m never quite able to discern the boundary between hallucination and truth.