KYOTOGRAPHIE Traveling Exhibition｜Suntag Noh

Suntag Noh

reallyGood, murder

Winner of the 2014 Korea Artist Prize, Suntag Noh has attracted attention in recent years as one of his country’s leading photographers. While studying politics in the early 1990s, violence brought about by the labor movement resulted in deadly clashes, causing him to see that the truth was often covered up, and news of the North Korean threat was often fabricated to justify the military dictatorship in South Korea at the time. Questions of “What is the truth?”, “What is under the surface?” resonated with Noh, leading him to become a photographer bringing into question the nature of truth.
Korean history and social issues are Noh’s favourite subjects. In “reallyGood, murder,” he photographs ordinary Koreans as they attend military drills and arms fairs, which are open to the public in South Korea. These lyrically expressive images reveal that while those weapons are being glorified in the name of technological progress and national security, the military displays turn them into a form of entertainment. The jarring juxtaposition of military hardware alongside people enjoying a day’s holiday may well provoke uneasiness in the viewer.
Noh mentions that playwright Samuel Beckett and Dadaist John Heartfield have influenced him the most. Different from news or documentary photos, his works attempt, he says, to question the myth of photography’s objectivity.