-Port of Vessels
Port of Vessels_Ha Manseok
A powerless barge that looks like ruins And a tug boat dragging a barge ten times larger. a rope connecting the two ine relationship resembles us living a hard life. They get close at a distance, get swept away by waves, get swept on rocks, and share the history of wounds. We feel sorry for each other's wounds, but we don't understand. However, at any moment, if you zoom in on the wound with a lens and press the shutter with your eyes on the scar, our relationship will be tied with a rope and never become a stranger. The wounds from the view finder look ironically stronger than the new ones. It's like an achievement that has already proven its history to the world.
Traces of the achievement were imaged.
Tethered Narratives: HA MANSEOK's Port of Vessels_2022 and the Poetics of Contingent Identity
_Kim Heekyoung Critical Perspective
HA MANSEOK's Port of Vessels_2022 unfolds as a quiet meditation on the boundaries of being, grounded in the industrial landscapes of Incheon's southern port, where aging vessels await repair. Through three central elements-a derelict barge, a modest yet resolute tugboat, and the rope that binds them-HA constructs a visual metaphor for the fragile architectures of human connection: imbalanced, at times precarious, but persistently interdependent.
For HA, identity is never isolated but continually forged in relation. In this work, the rope is not merely a utilitarian object but a philosophical axis — a tactile expression of the distance and dependency between two distinct entities. The barge, vast and inert, and the tug, small but determined, are bound together in an uneasy alliance. Their asymmetry echoes the reality of human ties, in which closeness and separation, burden and support, coexist.
The artist's gaze lingers on surfaces marked by time. He zooms in on the scraped, rusted, weathered exteriors of the vessels, reframing them as palimpsests of endurance and history. These are not merely signs of decay, but evidence of survival-testaments to encounters with pressure, abrasion, and resistance. In this, HA's perspective resonates with Judith Butler's conception of identity as performative and relational, built through repetition, rupture, and proximity.
His camera functions not as a tool of documentation but as an instrument of attunement. It approaches the wounds of the other not to expose, but to dwell with them-to sense their rhythm, their silence, their weight. Like the rope that ties the barge and tug, HA's photographs tether us to the emotional tension that exists between self and other, proximity and unknowability. Acknowledging that we may never fully reach the other's pain, he nonetheless insists on the importance of remaining within its orbit.
HA operates not from a fixed center but along the periphery. Between gaze and withdrawal, sensory engagement and physical distance, Port of Vessels_2022 becomes a visual navigation through the narrative of relation. It resists the closure of identity, favoring instead a poetics of contingency-where the self is always in motion, always becoming, shaped by the forces and frictions of the world around it.