Noh Suntag explores how the Korean War, though officially relegated to the past, remains alive and operative within contemporary Korean society. He focuses on the gap produced by the “power of division,” a force that repeatedly interprets reality to its own advantage by confining war and division to a fixed historical chapter. This power of division is not a relic but a present-day monster, actively operating—and malfunctioning—in both South and North Korea.
Gathering what oozes from this monster—spit and thick blood, madness and silence, profit and damage, bursts of laughter and cynical smiles, stoppage and flow—NOH allows these elements to slide past in images and words. Through such disruptions, which momentarily suspend the monster’s dream of a permanent state of exception, he seeks to expose the politics of the present.
Suntag studied political science before deciding to use photography to better communicate political activism during the demonstrations in the early 1990s. learning photography on the streets of conflict and clashes, he used his camera to capture the absurd social landscapes created by the Korean War and division. The division system has been distorting each other’s politics, economy, and culture, with repeated malfunctions in both South and North Korea. Despite intense mutual hatred, it has maintained a ‘mirror system’ in which the two sides increasingly resemble each other. Suntag gazes into the gaps between this hostile coexistence, creating ‘eyewitness accounts’ that blend photography and text. He seeks to reach the present through the stepping stones of the past.
Suntag’s photographic work and texts make him an important figure in political struggles in South Korea to this day. Beginning with “Smells like the Division of the Korean Peninsula (2004), he has held solo exhibitions both domestically and internationally, including “The strAnge Ball” (2006), “Red House” (2007), “State of Emergency” (2008), “reallyGood murder” (2010), “Forgetting Machine” (2012), and “Sneaky Snakes in Scenes of Incompetence” (2014).