-Beneath the Italian Facade

Gaze and Disintegration: Sensory Scenes Toward Self-liberation in Ha Manseok's "beneath the ITALIAN facade"

Ha Manseok's "beneath the ITALIAN facade" is a project that reinterprets the relationship between self and other through the visual language of photography in unfamiliar settings. Set against the backdrop of Italy, a space laden with historical and aesthetic layers, this work sensitively captures the vibrations of identity that arise in moments of encounter with the other.

Italy is a place where gazes accumulate. The alleys of cities, layered with Renaissance paintings, classical architecture, and the surfaces of memory, have functioned for centuries as objects of gaze and spaces of reproduction. Here, Ha Manseok, as a wanderer, gazes upon the faces of locals. Yet, he does not seek to understand or possess through this gaze. Instead, he loses himself in front of those faces and reconstructs his self in the midst of that loss.

Photography operates as a sensory intermediary in this process. The blurred surfaces of walls, fabrics, and streets in Italy are not mere subjects for Ha Manseok but tangible moments of relationships with others and glimpses where the self temporarily emerges. The artist does not interpret or stereotype the locals.

Instead, he simply gazes at the eyes met on the street, the indifferent expressions, the textures of faded buildings, etc., without attributing any meaning, sensing himself in the silence of that gaze.

In this project, "local and wanderer" are not merely spatial distinctions but modes of relating. While locals occupy the center of daily life, Ha Manseok circles around its periphery. Yet, rather than avoiding the periphery, he elevates a sense of identity possible only in that periphery. Identity, thus, emerges provisionally in residues of relationships when displaced from the center.

Italy's facade represents a beautiful and stable order, but Ha Manseok discovers cracks beneath that surface. This intention is not to dismantle identity but to explore the potential of the self as a fluid existence revealed and disappearing momentarily in encounters with others. His camera records these gaps and testifies to silent moments without response.

Ha Manseok's photographs do not explicitly pose the question "Who am I?" Instead, he asks, "Who are you?" and embeds a sense of this question returning to himself within the photographs. Self-liberation is not about complete identity but begins in relationships with others, characterized by incompleteness and temporality, quietly but firmly displayed by Ha Manseok.

"Beneath the ITALIAN facade" is a photographic journey where the self finally begins "becoming" in the gaze of the other viewed through the eyes of a stranger. It is not about annihilation through disintegration but about reconstruction through relationships. Ha Manseok, as a non-bound existence under the name of identity, accumulates moments of liberation through his camera, body, and gaze.