Hyun-Jin Kwak’s works capture situations that ‘tell a story’. These situations are devised, staged and recorded by the artist, usually in colour photographs that are painstakingly printed and mounted. Her work includes finding and directing actors, procuring costumes and props and selecting the sites where the ‘action’ will take place. In other words, her practice locates itself in the production-heavy genre of staged photography. Yet the images themselves are cinematic rather than spectacular; they signify movement in a grid-like constructed world of concepts.

Hyun-Jin Kwak’s photographs chart different experiences of ‘the individual’ versus ‘the collective’. They can be read as a comparative study of East Asian and Northern European conditions for the Subject, who in her visual constructions is always a female in the ambiguously transitive phase of teen to young woman.