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2015 - ...

Bang Sanghyeok (b.1988) was born in Seoul.

After studying sculpture at an arts high school, he began working with photography in 2009, using a camera inherited from his father after his military service.

His early work focused on images produced within love and relationships, as well as the structures of memory and emotion that accompanied them.

His process often began with personal interest,
developed into relationships, and then returned to a position of observation.

In his practice, black-and-white photography initially began as a formal choice, but gradually evolved into a condition for perceiving images. By removing color, he reduces external elements and brings forward the underlying structure and content of the subject.

Strong contrast plays a crucial role in his work. It reveals the subject while simultaneously obscuring it. Light and shadow distort form, allowing figures and objects to be perceived not as they are, but as transformed images. In this process, photography moves beyond simple representation and operates as a way of reconstructing the subject.

In works involving the human body, he does not treat it as a mere subject, but as a form shaped by intimacy within relationships. Nude imagery is used not to directly express emotion, but to convey the density, distance, and sensorial aspects formed within those relationships.

Through repeated experiences of separation and the deletion of images, he began to question not the moment of creation, but what remains after an image disappears. He then adopted a process of re-photographing and reconstructing deleted images as a method of working. However, these attempts do not lead to restoration. Rather, the more he tries to recover them, the more the image and the relationships tied to it collapse.

While he has expanded his practice through photography, text, and video, emotion no longer occupies the central position in his work. It still exists, but shifts into the conditions and structures of the image rather than being directly expressed.

Despite this, he continues to take photographs, repeatedly asking himself:

what is photography? What is an image?

And how can an image exist even after representation has disappeared?

His work ultimately unfolds from these questions, exploring not the creation of images, but the state and conditions that remain after their disappearance.

For ISSUE 2

Together with BANG, we are prepping the selection of his grand works

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THEO GOSSELIN - france (info)BANG SANGHYEOK - south korea (info) JENNIFER STENGLEIN - australia (info) © 2026 stay around.

THEO GOSSELIN - france (info)
BANG SANGHYEOK - south korea (info)
JENNIFER STENGLEIN - australia (info)

© 2026

stay around.