ROH, Seungbok has expanded the range of her art with photography and video and recently presented a meaningful series of photographs dealing with death and graveyard. Furthermore, as an extension of this, the artist has searched and investigated the accidents taking place in Seongam-do Jeju-do, Yeosu, Suncheon,etc., and their traces. For several years, she has explored this theme of death and graveyard with a few key sub-themes: the emotion evoked by floral tributes at park cemeteries, various sights of abandoned graves and potter's fields, stories disappearing with unsettled cases, the erased vestiges of those having suffered past wrongs in history, and so on. The artist even went as far as link the sub-themes to the complicated feelings and questions coming to her, showing her persistence in pursuing her artistic goals, Situated in this context, Bodyscape begins its story from some unknown graves which mounded like small hills in a pear orchard in Miyang-myeon, Anseong.

The work on the graveyard presented in this exhibition was first inspired by some graves which were abandoned, neglected, and ignored and the landscape of an orchard indifferently encompassing them, In other words, it can be called a ‘story of an orchard' with unidentified graves which came out of the blue (although, at first with reasons),The artist's previous work series The Edge of Landscape (2015), based on her personal experiences, revolved around her realization of death as something that is close around us, her actual situations, and philosophical questions about life and death. It was, according to her, an opportunity to look back on her life. The artist herself visited seventeen cemeteries all over the country, There she recorded many graves that made a contrast or harmony with the landscape around them on the one hand, and on the other. gave painterly and dramatic expressions to the strange feeling she had when seeing artificial flowers offered in memory of someone. About the time when she finished the series, ROH happened to find an orchard in Miyang-myeon, Anseong, which she intuitively found different from the cemetery landscapes she had seen before, although having similarity and continuity in the subject matter.As was shown by the previous works, we know that unknown or abandoned cemeteries are not very rare. However, it is also undeniable that the juxtaposition of an orchard, that is, a place pretty close to life which is under active agricultural production, with a graveyard creates an unfamiliar feeling The story told by this landscape led the artist to extend and explore the cemetery series. For this new project, she had frequently visited there and faithfully recorded every change of seasons and scenes since 2015.

Mr. Yoon, the owner of the pear farm, cultivated the orchard with his own hands, cutting down hills, turning the ground, and planting pear trees In the process of clearing, he left untouched the several unknown graves he found between large hills, and the orchard has gradually expanded into the present scale for the past fifty years. This place, created by an earnest farmer, was too large to be seen at a glance. Also, to make farming more comfortable, he dug deep and wide to lower the level of the ground, so that the graves looked outstanding like small hills, much higher than the man's height And invariable nature has continually changed the look of this place as if showing off its vitality. and we come to see the images of the graves which are exposed and then hidden over and over again.

Because the artist wanted to take a distant view of the landscape which was at once a graveyard and an orchard, ROH tried various methods. First, she actively used up-to-date pieces of equipment such as a drone, OSMO and DSLR cameras, and a camera dolly, so that she could take wide-, high-, or low-angle shots. in this way, she succeeded in recording natural scenes covering a long period of time and the strangely-looking graves. The video was decomposed into five channels, Featuring the track of time and changes of seasons, the five screens display a single scene commonly. or each five ones respectively. In some respects, the various shooting methods and the five-channel format are a device to express the artist's impression she received from a cemetery which was different from those in the previous works, They made it possible to dynamically show the time passing between the foreground of the orchard and the graves, the change of viewpoints and distance, and spectacles which extend human vision. And the viewers witness the traces of long years and hard work, especially from the perspective of human life, and view nature's heartless laws, regardless the human scale. Similarly, in the exhibition hall, ROH attempts to materialize the contact point between the landscape and the body of the audience. The enormous pentagonal space, also working as the screen on which the film is displayed, surrounds the viewers' body. As a result, they will feel the landscape not only through the distance of observation but also as the locus of senses.

The viewers may appreciate the scenery with pear trees and graves or enjoy a visual pleasure, fascinated by the abstract and decorative view of white pear blossoms. But within moments, the scene looking like an abstract painting turns to a vivid image of the orchard. This transition reminds you of the artist's photographic work 1366 Project, a color field abstract painting-like representation of a female body injured by violence and being whipped, which dealt with a social issue indirectly. Likewise in Bodyscape, ROH abruptly converts the beautiful details of the orchard to an abstract pattern, showing the four seasons in an aesthetic, repetitive way. It is true that the use of high-tech devices gives us the distance to sweep this high, remote landscape with a glace, but without knowing, we find ourselves going closer to the artist and deeper into the orchard she discovered. This might be because there is, behind the landscape, the life of farmers Mr. and Mrs. Yoon who dedicated their whole life to this orchard. These farmers lived a laborious life to cultivate the farm and grow fruits and put their life into this orchard. They leftthe place where some unknown person was buried as it is and filled the rest with pear trees And now, the farmer became old and sick with time, and in this fall, their grown-up son harvests appetizing pears in that orchard.

In fact, death is always hanging around us. But we live drawing a rigid line between life and death and has expelled the latter by making the grave. The grave mound built for that purpose makes us remember death on the one hand, and on the other, erases life. Bodyscape, although dealing with the tabooed subject, or death does not show unfamiliar or provocative images, but instead, only the rich and beautiful scenery of a pear farm you would find in an ordinary rural village. The place of the deceased is repeatedly covered and then discovered as if saying there is nothing sensational about it, The sight which was created by the taboo of leaving the graveyard without daring to damage it seems all to natural. Pear blossoms in full bloom add brilliance to the landscape: summer greens surround the farm with all the lush: when pear trees bear pear, people carefully wrap the fruits in paper to facilitate maturity and when leaves have all fallen and when it snows one day, a Korean water deer walks under the bare branches. In this unsurprising passage of time, only the changes of natural things repeat hiding and disclosing these graves. It seems meaningless to distinguish the graves covered with flowers or green leaves and the vitality of this pear orchard. The cycle of life, which nature show through the metaphor of the ecology of animals and plants, only reveals or screens the grave, as the marker indicating the zone in our mind between life and death. This landscape is a scene of paradox which was created by the farmers' life-long labor and the grave raised higher as a result of it. And it also tells us how absurd to divide life and death by people's sight and how naturally these incredible graves have been built.